Ten Years Near the German Frontier Part 6

'Do you mean----?'

'Nothing,' he said hastily, 'nothing; but the Russians use money freely; they would not dare to approach _you_. Nevertheless, I warn you that their marked regard for you must have some motive, and yours for them may excite suspicions.'

'Surely my friend Henckel-Donnersmarck has not reported me to the Kaiser?'

'Our ministers are expected to report everything to the Kaiser, especially from Copenhagen; but Henckel-Donnersmarck does not report enough. He is either too haughty or too lazy. My master will send him to Weimar, if he is not more alert; but we have others!'

'I like him.'

'It is evident. Why?' asked the Count, with great interest.

'I sent him a case of Lemp's beer. He says it is better than anything of the kind made in Germany--polite but unpatriotic.'

'You jest,' said the Count. 'You have the reputation of being apparently never in earnest, but----'

'You shall have a case too,' I said, 'and then you can judge whether his truthfulness got the better of his politeness, or his politeness of his truthfulness.' He rose and bowed, he seated himself again.

'Remember, we shall always be interested in you,' he said; 'but there is one thing I should like to ask--are you interested in potash?'

'I have no business interests. If you wish to talk business, Count, you must go to the Consul General.'

That was the beginning. Henckel and I continued to be friends. He seldom spoke of diplomatic matters. He a.s.sured me (over and over again) that, if the ideas of Frederick the Great were to be followed, Germany and the United States must remain friends. I told him that Count von X. had said that 'if the United States could arrange to oust England from control of the Atlantic and make an alliance with Germany, these two countries would rule the world.'

'You will never do that,' he said. 'You are safer with England on the Atlantic than you would be with any other nation. I am not sure what our ultra Pan-Germans mean by "ruling the world." You may be sure that your Monroe Doctrine would go to splinters if our Pan-Germans ruled the world. As for me, I am sick of diplomacy. Why do you enter it? It either bores or degrades one. I am not curious or unscrupulous enough to be a spy. As to Slesvig, I have little concern with it. If Germany should find it to her interest, she might return Northern Slesvig; but there would be danger in that for Denmark. She must live in peace with us, or take the consequences.'

'The consequences!'

'Dear colleague, you know as well as I do that all the nations of the earth want territory or a new adjustment of territory. In the Middle Ages, nations had many other questions, and there was a universal Christendom; but, since the Renascence, the great questions are land and commerce. Germany must look, in self-defence, on Slesvig and Denmark as p.a.w.ns in her game. She is not alone in this. You know how tired I am of it all. No man is more loyal to his country than I am; but I should like to see Germany on entirely sympathetic terms with the kingdoms that compose it and reasonably friendly to the rest of the world; but we could not give up Slesvig, even if the Danish Government would take it, except for a _quid pro quo_.'

'What?'

'Well, let us say a place in the Pacific, on friendly terms with you.

Your country can hardly police the Philippines against j.a.pan. Germany is great in what I fear is the New Materialism. As to Slesvig, in which you seem particularly interested, ask Prince Koudacheff, the Russian Minister; write to Iswolsky, the Russian Minister, or talk to Michel Bibikoff, who is a Russian patriot never bored in the pursuit of information. These Russians may not exaggerate the consequences as they know what absolute power means.

'There is one thing, Germany will not tolerate sedition in any of her provinces, and, since we took Slesvig from Denmark in 1864, she is one of our provinces. The Danes may tolerate a hint of secession on the part of Iceland, which is amusing, but the beginning of sedition in Slesvig would mean an att.i.tude on our part such as you took towards secession in the South. But it is unthinkable. The demonstrations against us in Slesvig have no importance.'

Michel Bibikoff, Secretary of the Russian Legation, was most intelligent and most alert. Wherever he is now, he deserves well of his country. As a diplomatist he had only one fault--he underrated the experience and the knowledge of his opponents; but this was the error of his youth. I say 'opponents,' because at one time or other Bibikoff's opponents were everybody who was not Russian. A truer patriot never lived. He was devoted to my predecessor, Mr. O'Brien, who was, in his opinion, the only American gentleman he had ever met.

He compared me very unfavourably with my courteous predecessor, who has filled two emba.s.sies with satisfaction to his own country and to those to whom he was accredited.

At first Bibikoff distrusted me; and I was delighted. If he thought that you were concealing things he would tell you something in order to find out what he wanted to know. For me, I was especially interested in discovering what the Tsar's state of mind was concerning the Portsmouth peace arrangements. Bibikoff had means of knowing. Indeed, he found means of knowing much that might have been useful to all of us, his colleagues. A long stay in the United States would have 'made' Bibikoff. He was one of the few men in Europe who understood what Germany was aiming at. He predicted the present war--but of that later. He had been in Washington only a few months.

I suffered as to prestige in the beginning only, as every American minister and amba.s.sador suffers from our present system of appointing envoys. No representative of the United States is at first taken seriously by a foreign country. He must earn his spurs, and, by the time he earns them, they are, as a rule, ruthlessly hacked off!

Each amba.s.sador is supposed by the Foreign Offices to be appointed for the same reason that so many peerages have been conferred by the British Government. Every minister, it is presumed, has given a _quid pro quo_ for being distinguished from the millions of his countrymen.

'If you have the price, you can choose your emba.s.sy,' is a speech often quoted in Europe. I cannot imagine who made it--possibly the famous Flannigan, of Texas. It is notorious that peerages are sold for contributions to the campaign fund in England; but places in the diplomatic service, though governed sometimes by political influence, cannot be said to be sold.

I had one advantage; n.o.body suspected me of paying anything for my place; and, then, I had come from Washington, the capital of the country.

As I said, my eyes were fixed on Russia. I found, however, that the main business of my colleagues seemed to be to watch Germany, and that att.i.tude for a time left me cold. Denmark had reason to fear Germany; but then, at that time, every other European nation was on its guard against possible aggressions on the part of its neighbours.

I had hope that a Scandinavian Confederacy or the swelling rise of the Social Democracy in Germany would put an end to the fears of all the little countries. There seemed to be no hope that the att.i.tude of the German nation towards the world could change unless the Social Democrats and the Moderate Liberals should gain power.

But why should we watch Germany, the powerful, the self-satisfied, the splendid country whose Kaiser professed the greatest devotion to our President, and had sent his brother, Prince Henry, over to show his regard for our nation? I was most anxious to find the reason.

In my time, good Americans--say in 1880--when they died, went to Paris, never to Berlin. The Emperor of Germany had determined to change this. He tried to make his capital a glittering imitation of Paris; he received Americans with every show of cordiality.

Berlin was to be made a paradise for Americans and for the world; but nearly every American is half French at heart. Nevertheless, I do not think that we took the French att.i.tude of revenge against Germany seriously; we thought that the French were beginning to forget the _revanche_; their Government had apparently become so 'international.' Many of us had been brought up with the Germans and the sons of Germans. We read German literature; we began with Grimm and went on to Goethe and, to descend somewhat, Heyse and Auerbach.

Without asking too many questions, we even accepted Frederick the Great as a hero. He was easier to swallow than Cromwell, and more amusing.

In fact, most of us did not think much of foreign complications, the charm of the Deutscher Club in Milwaukee, the warmth of the singing of German _lieder_ by returned students from Freiburg or Bonn or Heidelberg; the lavish hospitality of the opulent German in this country, the German love for family life, and, for me personally, the survival of the robust virtues, seemingly of German origin, among the descendants of the Germans in Pennsylvania, impressed me.

As far as education was concerned, I had hated to see the German methods and ideas _servilely_ applied. I belonged to the Alliance Francaise and preferred the French system as more efficient in the training of the mind than the German. Besides, the importation of the German basis for the doctorate of philosophy into our universities seemed to me to be dangerous. It led young men to waste time, since there was no governmental stamp on their work and no concrete recognition of the results of their studies as there was in Germany; and, this being so, it meant that the dignified degree, from the old-fashioned point of view, would become degraded, or, at its best, merely a degree for the decoration of teachers. It would be sought for only as a means of earning a living, not as a preparation for research.

'Of course I know Spain,' said a flippant attache in Copenhagen. 'I have seen _Carmen_, eaten _olla podrida_, and adored the Russian ballet in the _cachuca_!' None of my friends who thought they knew Germany was as bad as this. Some of the professors of my acquaintance, who had seen only one side of German life, loved the Fatherland for its support to civilisation. _Nous avons change--tout cela!_

Other gentlemen, who had started out to love Germany, hated everything German because they had been compelled to stand up in an exclusive club when anybody of superior rank entered its sacred precincts or when something of the kind happened. The man with whom I had read Heine and worked out jokes in _Kladdertasch_ was devoted to everything German because he had once lived in a small German town where there was good opera! Personally, I had hated Bismarck and all his works and pomps for several reasons:--one was because of Busch's glorifying book about him; another for the Kulturkampf; another for his att.i.tude toward Hanover, and because one of my closest German friends was a Hanoverian.

Brought up, as most Philadelphians of my generation were, in admiration for Karl Schurz and the men of '48, I could not tolerate anything that was Prussian or Bismarckian; but, as Windthorst, the creator of the Centrum party in the Reichstag, was one of my heroes, I counted myself as the admirer of the best in Germany.

The position of the great power, evident by its att.i.tude to us in the beginning of the Spanish-American war, was disquieting; but Germany had shown a similar sensitiveness under similar circ.u.mstances many times without affecting international relations. And German world dominion? What, in the Twentieth Century?--the best of all possible centuries? Civilised public opinion would not tolerate it!

In the Balkans, of course, there would always be rows. The German propaganda? It existed everywhere, naturally. One could see signs of that; these signs were not even concealed. It seemed to be reasonable enough that any country should not depend entirely on the press or diplomatic notes to avoid misunderstanding; and a certain attention to propaganda was the duty of all diplomatists.

Still, my observations in my own country, even before the Chicago Exposition--when the Kaiser had done his best to impress us with the mental and material value of everything German--had made me more than suspicious. I had reason to be suspicious, as you will presently see.

But war? Never!

It was Cardinal Falconio who, I think, made me feel a little chilly, when he wrote: 'War is not improbable in Europe; you are too optimistic. Let us pray that it may not come; but, as a diplomatist you must not be misled into believing it impossible.' It seemed to me that such talk was pessimistic. Other voices, from the diplomatists of the Vatican--even the ex-diplomatists--confirmed this. 'If the Kaiser says he wants peace, it is true--but only on his own terms. Believe me, if the Kaiser can control Russia, and draw a straight line to the Persian Gulf, he will close his fist on England.'

The people at the Vatican, if you can get them to talk, are more valuable to an inquiring mind than any other cla.s.s of men; but they are so wretchedly discreet just when their indiscretions might be most useful. Some of them are like King James I., who 'never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one.' Those who helped me with counsel were both wise in speech and prudent action but, unhappily, hampered by circ.u.mstances. Among the wise and the prudent I do not include the diplomatic representative of the Vatican in Paris just before the break with Rome!

The Russians in Copenhagen kept their eyes well on Germany; and it was evident that, while the position of France gave the Germans no uneasiness--they seemed to look on France with a certain contempt--any move of Russia was regarded as important. Prince Koudacheff, late the Russian Amba.s.sador at Madrid, in 1907 Minister at Copenhagen, who seldom talked politics, again returned to the great question.

'My brother, who is in Washington, and an admirer of your country, says that you Americans believe that war is unthinkable. Is this your opinion?'

'It is--almost.'

'Well, I will say that as soon as the bankers feel that there is enough money, there will be a war in Europe.'

'I wonder if your husband meant that?' I asked the Princess Koudacheff; it was well to have corroboration occasionally, and she was a sister-in-law of Iswolsky's; Iswolsky was a synonym for diplomatic knowledge.

'If he did not mean it he would not have said it. When he does not mean to say a thing he remains silent. As soon as there is money enough, there will be war. Germany will go into no war that will impoverish her,' she said. Her opinion was worth much; she was a woman who knew well the inside of European politics.

'And who will fight, the Slavs and Teutons?'

'You have said it! It will come.'

I knew a Russian who, while a n.o.bleman, was not an official. In fact, he hated bureaucrats. He could endure no one in the Russian court circle except the Empress Dowager, Marie, because she was sympathetic, and the late Grand Duke Constantine, because he had translated Shakespeare.

'If Prince Valdemar of Denmark had been the son instead of the brother of the Dowager Empress, Russia would have a future. As it is, I will quote from Father Gapon for you. You know his _Life_?'