The Assault Part 6

"From the bottom of my heart I thank you for the expression of your love and your loyalty. In the struggle now impending I know no more parties among my people. There are now only Germans among us. Whichever parties, in the heat of political differences, may have turned against me, I now forgive from the depths of my heart. The thing now is that all should stand together, shoulder to shoulder, like brothers, and then G.o.d will help the German sword to victory!"

No historian of Germany in war-time will be able to say that his people did not take the Kaiser's stirring admonition to heart.

CHAPTER VIII

THE AMERICANS

On the occasion, nine or ten years ago, when it was my privilege to be presented for the first time to that most sane and suave of German statesmen, Prince Bulow--it was at one of his so-called "parliamentary evenings" at the Imperial Chancellor's Palace during the political season,--he inquired, pleasantly:

"How long are you remaining in Germany?"

"Just as long as Your Serene Highness will permit," I responded, half facetiously and half seriously, for foreign correspondents are occasionally expelled from Germany for pernicious professional activity.

For the ten days preceding August 1, 1914, while the European cloudburst was gathering momentum, such time as I could spare from the chase for the nimble item was devoted to patching up my journalistic fences in Berlin, with a view to remaining there throughout the war. There was at that time no conclusive indication that England would be involved.

Having seen Germany in full and magnificent stride in peace, I was overwhelmingly anxious to watch her in the practise of her real profession. As an American citizen and special correspondent of three great American newspapers--the _New York Times, Philadelphia Public Ledger_ and _Chicago Tribune_--and fully accredited as such in German official quarters, I had every reason to hope that, even if England were drawn into the war (as to which I, myself, was never in doubt), my previous status as Berlin correspondent of Lord Northcliffe's _Daily Mail_ would not interfere with my remaining in Germany as an American writing exclusively for American papers. It was, of course, obvious that if this permission were granted me, my connection with the British news organization, which for years was Germany's _bete noire_, would have automatically to cease.

In Amba.s.sador Gerard, as ever, I found a ready supporter of my plans.

He recognized, as I did, that a "_Daily Mail_ man," particularly one who had specialized, as I did for eight years, in publishing as much as I dared about Germany's palpable preparations for war, would perhaps be on thin ice in asking favors of the Kaiser's Government at such an hour.

But Judge Gerard also knew that, while persistently doing my duty in reporting the sleepless machinations of the German War Party to attain "a place in the sun," I had written copiously in England and with equal faithfulness of the many attractive and favorable aspects of German life and inst.i.tutions. In 1913 I produced a little book, _Men Around the Kaiser_, which from cover to cover was a sincere hymn of praise of almost everything Teutonic. This foreigner's tribute to the real source of modern German greatness--the Fatherland's captains of science, art, letters, commerce, finance and industry--was considered so fair and flattering to the Germans that _Manner um den Kaiser_, a German translation, went through eight editions to the two of the English original. During the Zabern army upheaval in Alsace-Lorraine in the winter of 1913-14 an article of mine in _The Daily Mail_ ent.i.tled "What the Colonel Said" was the only presentation of the German military att.i.tude published in England. Even the War Party newspapers in Berlin honored me with a reproduction of that attempt to interpret the Prussian point of view that, where the sacredness of the King's tunic is at stake, all other considerations vanish into insignificance.

The Amba.s.sador suggested, in the always practical way of American diplomacy, that I should a.s.semble for him a _dossier_ of some of my newspaper work in Berlin showing that I had consistently attempted to show the bright, as well as the dark side, of the German picture. Judge Gerard promised to submit my desire to remain in Germany during war, if war came, to Foreign Secretary von Jagow and to recommend that my aspiration should be gratified. It was welcome news which the Amba.s.sador was finally enabled to give me on August 1, that the Foreign Secretary had considered my application and granted it. I rejoiced that a long-cherished ambition seemed on the brink of realization--to see the terrible German war-machine at work, to report its sanguinary operations from the inside, and perhaps some day to record in a book, which would have been incomparably more vital than this bloodless narrative, my close-range impressions of man-killing as an applied art.

I was not the only American appealing to our Emba.s.sy for amelioration of my troubles about this time. In fact there were so many others--hundreds and hundreds of them--that the Amba.s.sador and his small staff ceased altogether to be diplomats and became merely comforters of distracted compatriots plunged suddenly into the abyss of terror and helplessness in a strange land by the specter of war. From early morning till long past midnight Wilhelms Platz 7, the dignified home maintained by the Gerards as American headquarters in Germany, was besieged by a mob of stranded or semi-stranded fellow citizens who flocked to the Emba.s.sy like chicks running to cover beneath the protecting wing of a mother hen. Never even in the history of Cook's was so frantic a conclave of the personally conducted a.s.sembled. They wanted two things and wanted them at once--money and facilities to get out of Germany with the least possible delay. That bespectacled school-marm from Paducah, Kentucky, had not come to Berlin to eat war bread and spend her spare time proving her ident.i.ty at the police station--she moaned in tearful accents. That aldermanic committee of Battle Creek, Michigan, was not getting what it bargained for--study of Berlin's sewage farms and munic.i.p.al labor exchanges. Its main concern now was to reach Dutch or Scandinavian territory, with the minimum of procrastination. That portly Chicago millionaire's wife yonder, when she bought a letter of credit on the Dresdner Bank, had not figured even on the remote possibility of its refusing to hand her over all the money she might care to draw. The moment had come, she was vociferating, to see what "American citizenship amounts to, anyhow," and what she demanded was a special train to warless frontiers, and then a ship to take her "home." These were just a few of the plaints and claims which issued in a crescendo of insistence and panic from these neurotic tourist folk, who, in tones often more imperious than appealing, wanted to know what "Our Government" intended to do with its war refugees and refugettes cruelly trapped in Armageddonland.

Americans who come to Europe proverbially feel a proprietary interest in their Emba.s.sies, Legations and Consulates. The Berlin Amba.s.sador for years put in much valuable time a.s.suaging the grief and disappointment of brother patriots who felt a G.o.d-given right to gratify such trifling ambitions as an audience with the Kaiser, an inspection of the German army or minor favors like exploration of the German educational system under the personal chaperonage of the Minister for Culture. Then, of course, there was the ever-present "German-Americans," who, having slipped away from their beloved Fatherland in youth without performing military service, would risk a visit to native haunts in later life, only to fall victim to the German military police system which has a long memory and a still longer arm for such transgressors. On many such an occasion, even when, like a Chicago man I know, the "German-American"

stole back under an a.s.sumed name, the paternal diplomatic intervention of the United States has saved the "deserter" from a felon's cell in his "Fatherland."

By the morning of August 4, the American panic in Berlin began to a.s.sume truly disastrous dimensions. The Emba.s.sy was literally jammed with fretting men, and weepy women and children. Every room overflowed with them. The cry was now for pa.s.sports. It was coming from all parts of the country. All foreigners were suspect, English-speaking ones in particular, and the German police were demanding in martial tone that _Auslander_ should "legitimatize" themselves.

The railways were available now only for troops. The Hamburg-American and North German Lloyd had canceled all their west-bound sailings, and our Consular officials in Hamburg and Bremen were telegraphing the Berlin Emba.s.sy that they, too, were stormed by throngs of Americans in various stages of anxiety, fear and financial embarra.s.sment. From Frankfort-on-the-Main came a similar tale of woe. All around that delightful city are famous German watering places--Bad Nauheim, Homburg, Wiesbaden, Langen-Schwalbach, Baden-Baden, Kissingen and the like--and American "cure-guests," regardless of their rheumatism, heart troubles, gout and other frailties for which German waters are a panacea, forgot such insignificant woes in the now crowning anguish to own a pa.s.sport which would designate them as peaceable and peace-loving children of the Stars and Stripes.

The Emba.s.sy rapidly and patiently mastered the situation. Mrs. Gerard converted herself into the adopted mother of every lachrymose American woman and child squatted on her broad marble staircase. Mrs. Gherardi, the wife of our Naval Attache, and Mrs. Ruddock, the wife of the Third Secretary, who were at the time the only feminine members of the Emba.s.sy family, resourcefully seconded the Amba.s.sadress' efforts to soothe the emotions of the sobbing sisters and youngsters from Iowa and Maine, from Pennsylvania and Texas, from Montana and Florida, and from nearly all the other States of the Union, who refused to view qualmless the prospect of remaining shut up for Heaven knew how long in war-mad Germany, already effectually isolated from the rest of the world behind an impenetrable ring of steel. As for the men of the Emba.s.sy, from the Amba.s.sador down to "Wilhelm," the old German doorkeeper who has initiated two generations of American diplomats into the mysteries of their profession in Berlin, no faithful servants of an ungrateful Republic ever came so valiantly to the rescue of fellow taxpayers. The Emba.s.sy apartments, including the Amba.s.sador's own sanctuary, were turned into offices which looked for all the world like a Census Bureau.

Every available s.p.a.ce for a desk was usurped by somebody taking applications for pa.s.sports or filling up the pa.s.sports themselves, to be turned over to Judge Gerard in an unceasing stream for his signature and seal. Uncle Sam surely never raked in so many two-dollar fees at one killing in all the history of his Berlin office. Nor did American citizens, I fancy, ever part with money which they considered half so good an investment.

The Emba.s.sy itself, hopelessly understaffed for such an emergency, was, of course, quite unequal to the enormous strain suddenly imposed upon it, so volunteer attaches and clerks were gladly pressed into service.

There, for instance, sat a Guggenheim copper magnate, who probably never lifts a pen except to sign a million-dollar check, at work with a mantel-piece as a desk, recording the vital statistics of a Vermont grocery-man who wanted a pa.s.sport. In another corner sat Henry White, ex-Amba.s.sador in Rome and Paris, scribbling away at breakneck pace, in order that the age, complexion and height of that trembling Va.s.sar graduate might be quickly and accurately inscribed in an application for a Yankee parchment. There, with the arm of a chair as his desk, was Professor Jeremiah W. Jenks, great authority on political economy, currency and trusts, patiently extorting the story of his life from the coroner of the Minnesota county who had been caught in the German war maelstrom in the midst of an investigation of munic.i.p.al morgues. What a vast practical experience of inquests he might have reaped had he remained in Europe! And over there, looking out on the Wilhelms Platz, with a window-sill as a writing-board, the t.i.tian-haired belle of Berlin's American colony, in daintiest of midsummer frocks and saucy turbans, who had never in years done anything more strenuous than organize a tea-party, was in harness as a volunteer in the impromptu army of Uncle Sam's clerks, doing her bit for her country and country-folk. It was all very typically and very delightfully American, a composite of true Democracy in which one is for all, and all for one.

I like to doubt if there are any other people on earth who turn in and help one another in a spirit of all-engulfing national comradeship so readily, so unconventionally and so good-naturedly as Americans. That drama of companionship in misery and adaptability to emergency conditions, which held the boards at the American Emba.s.sy in Berlin during the first week of the Great War, will live long in the memory of those who witnessed it as one of the striking impressions of a Brobdingnagian moment.

Obviously things would have been different if the crisis had not found two real Americans in command of the Emba.s.sy in the persons of Mr. and Mrs. Gerard. When the typical New Yorker whom President Wilson sent to Berlin less than a year previous was first presented to his compatriots at a little function at which it was my honor to preside, the man whom political detractors contemptuously referred to as "a Tammany Judge"

made a "keynote speech," which he meant to be interpreted as his "policy" in Germany, as far as Americans were concerned. He said: "When the time comes for me to retire from Berlin, if you will call me the most American Amba.s.sador who ever represented you in Germany, you can call me after that anything you please."

Two years--what years--have elapsed since "Jimmy" Gerard made public avowal of his conception of what United States diplomatic representatives abroad ought to be--Americans, first, last and all the time. As these lines are written German-American official relations seem on the verge of rupture and our emba.s.sy's remaining days in Berlin appear to be calculable in hours. Whether it shall turn out that the _Arabic_ insult was after all swallowed as the _Lusitania_ infamy was stomached, or whether Judge Gerard is finally recalled from Berlin as a protest extracted at length from the most patient, reluctant and long-suffering Government on record, he will richly have realized his ambition--to be "the most American Amba.s.sador" ever accredited to the German court. In my time in Berlin I knew four American amba.s.sadors.

Each one was a credit to his nation. But "Jimmy" Gerard was "the most American," and I count that, in a citizen of the United States called to _represent_ his country abroad, the superlative quality. The seductive atmosphere of a Court in which adulation was obsequiously practised, especially toward Americans, never turned the head of Judge Gerard or his wife. They had far more than the share of hobn.o.bbing with Royalty which falls to the lot of diplomatic newcomers in Berlin. Princes and princesses came with unwonted freedom to Wilhelms Platz 7. They found the former Miss Daly, of Anaconda, Montana, being a natural young American woman, as much at ease in their gilded presence as she was the day before when presiding over the tempestuous deliberations of the American Woman's Club out on Prager Platz.

To me the Gerards, apart from their personal charm, unaffected dignity and joyous Americanism, always were psychologically interesting because they typified so splendidly that greatest of our national traits--adaptability. To be dropped into the vortex of European political life, with its gaping pitfalls and brilliant opportunities for mistakes, is not child's play even for the most experienced of men and women. France, for example, regarded no name in its diplomatic register less eminent than that of a Cambon fit to head its mission to Berlin.

England kept at the Hohenzollern court the most gifted amba.s.sador on the Foreign Office's active list--Sir Edward Goschen. Unthinking Americans, by which I mean those who underestimate our inherent capacity to land on our feet, may have had their misgivings when a mere Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York and the daughter of a Montana copper king were sent to represent America among professional diplomats of the highest European rank. But "Jimmy" and "Molly" Gerard made good.

It is the American way, and because it is that, it is their way. As for the Amba.s.sador, he has demonstrated, to my way of thinking, that a graduate course in the university of American politics is ideal training for diplomacy. Intelligence, tact, resourcefulness and courage, the rudiments of the diplomatic career, are qualities which surely nothing can develop in a man more thoroughly than the hurly-burly, rough-and-tumble, give-and-take of an American electioneering campaign.

It is amid its storms and tribulations that a man learns to be something more than an inhabited dress-suit. It is there he acquires the art of being human. It is there that he comes to appreciate the priceless value of loyalty. United States Presidents do not err seriously when they hunt for amba.s.sadors among men who have been through the preparatory school from which "Jimmy" Gerard holds a _magnum c.u.m laude_.

My personal observations of Judge Gerard's amba.s.sadorial methods are based for the most part on his career before the war. But he has not departed from them during the war. Bismarck laid it down as a maxim that an amba.s.sador should not be "too popular" at the court to which he was accredited. From all one can gather, "Jimmy" Gerard has not laid himself open to that charge in Berlin since August, 1914. n.o.body who knows him ever suspected for a moment that he would. Toadying is not in his lexicon, and aggressively pro-American amba.s.sadors are condemned in advance to be disliked in Germany. They do not fit into the Teutonic diplomatic scheme. If they are inspired by such unconventional aspirations as those to which Judge Gerard gave utterance in his "keynote speech" to the American Luncheon Club of Berlin, it is morally certain that their usefulness--to Germany--is limited.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Mrs. Gerard.]

The American Amba.s.sador had been acting for Great Britain in the enemy's country barely thirty-six hours, when Sir Edward Goschen, Great Britain's retiring Amba.s.sador in Berlin, in his official report on the knightly treatment accorded him and his staff during their last hours on German soil, wrote:

"I should also like to mention the great a.s.sistance rendered to us all by my American colleague, Mr. Gerard, and his staff. Undeterred by the hooting and hisses with which he was often greeted by the mob on entering and leaving the Emba.s.sy, His Excellency came repeatedly to see me, to ask how he could help us and to make arrangements for the safety of stranded British subjects. He extricated many of these from extremely difficult situations at some personal risk to himself and his calmness and _savoir faire_ and his firmness in dealing with the Imperial authorities gave full a.s.surance that the protection of British subjects and interests could not have been left in more efficient and able hands."

n.o.body who ever knew "Jimmy" Gerard--that is the affectionate way in which old friends and even acquaintances of brief duration almost invariably speak of him--would expect him to be anything in the world except "undeterred" by the cowardly onslaughts of the Berlin barbarians.

An expert swimmer, clever amateur boxer, crack shot, volunteer soldier and veteran of New York politics, "Jimmy" Gerard never knew the meaning of the word fear, and the unfailing courage with which he has "stood up"

to the Kaiser's Government throughout the various crises of the war has been in full keeping with his virile temperament.

It is sometimes said that our diplomatic system, or such as it is, reduces American amba.s.sadors and ministers to the status of messenger-boys, who have little to do but to carry back and forth between their offices and the foreign ministries to which they are accredited the communications and instructions which Washington sends them. There could, of course, be no more obtuse misconception. Berlin, the capital of _Macht-politik_, is particularly a capital in which everything depends on the manner in which a foreign Government's views are expressed or its wishes conveyed. It has not been my privilege to be behind the innocuous von Jagow's screen when "Jimmy" Gerard strolled across the Wilhelms Platz to the ramshackle old _Auswartiges Amt_, to tell the German Government what Washington thought of this, that or the other of her recurring acts of lawlessness, but I vow that von Jagow has got to know Gerard for just what he is--an American from the top of his extraordinarily well-shaped head to the soles of his feet. The war has brought us many blessings. Among them we may count high the fact that at the capital of the enemy of all mankind we had, ready to speak up and to stand up for us, in gladness or vicissitude, a real man.

No story of our Berlin war Emba.s.sy would be complete without a reference to the Amba.s.sador's lieutenants, who, inspired by his own example of unruffled good nature and limitless patience, capably played their own trying parts. At Judge Gerard's right hand was Joseph Clark Grew, First Secretary, Harvard '02, who, having shot wild beasts in the jungles of Asia, would naturally not quail before Germans, no matter how stormy the conditions. Grew is one of the exceptional young men in our diplomatic service, because, he has weathered its snares unspoiled. A distinguished secretarial career at such important posts as Cairo, Mexico City, Vienna, Petrograd and Berlin, in the course of which he frequently acted as Amba.s.sador or Minister in charge, has left him, at thirty-five, as natural, human and American as no doubt many Harvard men are while still beneath the democratizing influence of the campus elms.

I mention the preservation of these qualities in Grew because they have been known to disappear in many of our worthy young fellow countrymen, jumped precipitately from college into representative positions abroad, and who thenceforth refused to brush shoulders with anything beneath the rank of royalty.

In Roland B. Harvey and Albert Billings Ruddock, respectively Second and Third Secretaries, Judge Gerard was also the fortunate possessor of a couple of adjutants who, in the presence of emergency, showed that hustle and _bonhomie_, besides being American talents, are diplomatic traits of no mean order. To preserve calm during the pa.s.sport stampede of the first week of August, 1914, was to exhibit the _finesse_ of a Disraeli. Harvey and Ruddock are types of the younger generation of American diplomatists who go in for the career with a view to devoting themselves to its serious side and from among whom, some day, we ought to evolve a professional service worthy of the name. Neither of them ever struck me as being afflicted by such emotions as filled the breast of a certain well-known young man when promoted from a European first-secretaryship to one of our important ministerships in South America. "Well, old boy," I asked him, "what do you think about going to ----?" "Oh," he rejoined, "I suppose it's all right, but it's a h-- of a way from Paris!"

I must not end this chapter, which I hope is recognizable as a poor expression of grat.i.tude to all concerned for many kindnesses rendered, without a mention of the youngest, but by no means the least meritorious member, of the Berlin war Emba.s.sy family--Lanier Winslow, the Amba.s.sador's ever-ebullient private secretary. War sobered Winslow so rapidly that he committed matrimony before it was six months old. I can hear him now, in the midst of the pa.s.sport panic, still imitating Frank Tinney or humming _Get Out and Get Under_, just as Nero might have done if Rome had known what rag-time was. At an hour when it was most needed, Lanier Winslow was a paragon of good humor, and altogether, by common consent, a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

CHAPTER IX

AUGUST FOURTH

Germany's war Juggernaut by the morning of Monday, August 3, was in full, but incredibly noiseless, motion. I always knew it was a magnificently well greased machine, geared for the maximum of silence, but I felt sure it could not swing into action without some reverberating creaks. Yet Berlin externally had been far more feverishly agitated on Spring Parade days at recurring ends of May than it was now, with "enemies all around" and that "war on two fronts,"

which most Germans used to talk about as something, _Gott sei Dank_, they would never live to see. One's male friends of military age--it was now the second day of mobilization--kept on melting away from hour to hour, but amid a complete lack of fuss and bustle. It almost seemed as if the army had orders to rush to the fighting-line in gum-shoes and that everything on wheels had rubber tires. As the Fatherland for years had armed in silence, so she was going to battle. We saw no seventeen-inch guns rumbling to the front. Those were Germany's best-concealed weapons. A military attache of one of the chief belligerents, who lived in Berlin for four years preceding the war, has since confessed that he never even knew of the "Big Berthas'" existence!

Germany girding for Armageddon was distinctly a disappointment. I entirely agreed with a portly dowager from the Middle West, who, between frettings about when she could get a train to the Dutch frontier, continually expressed her chagrin at such "a poor show." She imagined, like a good many of the rest of us, that mobilization in Germany would at the very least see the Supreme War Lord bolting madly up and down _Unter den Linden_, plunging silver spurs into a foaming white charger and brandishing a glistening sword in martial gestures as Caruso does when he plays Radames in the finale of the second act of Aida. Verdi's Egyptian epic is the Kaiser's favorite opera, and he ought to have remembered, we thought, how a conquering hero should demean himself at such a blood-stirring hour. At least Berlin, we hoped, would rise to the occasion, and thunder and rock with the pomp and circ.u.mstance of war's alarums.

There was amazingly little of anything of that sort. The Kaiser instead automobiled around town in a prosaic six-cylinder Mercedes, as he long was wont to do, just keeping some rather important professional engagements with the Chief of the General Staff, the Imperial Chancellor and the Secretary of the Navy. As he flitted by, the huge crowds lined up on the curbstone stiffened into att.i.tudes, clicked heels, doffed hats and "_hoched_." The atmosphere was _stimmungsvoller_ than usual, for German phlegm had vanished along with high prices on the Bourse, but the paroxysm of electric excitement which I always fancied would usher in a German war was unaccountably missing. When you mentioned that phenomenon to German friends, their bosoms swelled with visible pride.

They were immeasurably flattered by your indirect compliment that the Kaiser's war establishment was so perfect a mechanism that it could clear for action almost imperceptibly.

I had now deserted my home in suburban Wilmersdorf, which I nicknamed the "District of Columbia," for in and all around it Berlin's American colony was domiciled, and taken a room for the opening scenes of the war drama in the Hotel Adlon. With its broad fronts on the Linden and Pariser Platz, and the French, British and Russian Emba.s.sies within a stone's throw to the right and left, the Adlon was an ideal vantage point. If there were to be "demonstrations," I could feel sure, at so strategic a point, of being in the thick of them. Events of the succeeding thirty-six hours were to show that I did not reckon without my host on that score.

From window and balcony overlooking the Linden I could now see or hear at intervals detachments of Berlin regiments, Uhlans or Infantry of the Guard, or a battery of light artillery, swinging along to railway stations to entrain for the front. Occasionally battalions of provincial regiments, distinguishable because the men did not tower into s.p.a.ce like Berlin's guardsmen, crossed town en route from one train to another. The men seemed happier than I had ever before seen German soldiers. That was the only difference, or at least the princ.i.p.al one.

The prospect of soon becoming cannon-fodder was evidently far from depressing. Most of them carried flowers entwined round the rifle barrel or protruding from its mouth. Here and there a bouquet dangled rakishly from a helmet. Now and then a flaxen-haired Prussian girl would step into the street and press a posey into some trooper's grimy hand. Yet, except for the fact that the soldiers were all in field gray, (I wonder when the Kaiser's military tailors began making those millions of gray uniforms!) with even their familiar spiked headpiece masked in canvas of the same hue, the Kaiser's fighting men marching off to battle might have been carrying out a workaday route-march. Then, suddenly, a company or a whole battalion would break into song, and the crowd, trailing alongside the ba.s.s-drum of the band, just as in peace times, would take up the refrain, and presently half-a-mile of _Unter den Linden_ was echoing with _Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles_, and I knew that the Fatherland was at war.

At the railway stations of Berlin and countless other German towns and cities at that hour heart-rending little tragedies were being enacted, as fathers, mothers, wives, sisters and sweethearts bade a long farewell to the beloved in gray. Only rarely did some man in uniform himself surrender to the emotions of the moment. These swarthy young Germans, with fifty or sixty pounds of impedimenta strapped round them, were endowed with Spartan stolidity now, and smilingly buoyed up the drooping spirits of the kith and kin they were leaving behind. "_Es wird schon gut, Mutterchen! Es wird schon gut!_" (It will be all right, mother dear! It will be all right!) Thus they returned comfort for tears.