The Assault Part 8

[Ill.u.s.tration: Berlin Mob Attacking British Emba.s.sy on the night of Aug.

4, 1914. (Drawn for the Ill.u.s.trated London News from a description by the author.)]

I started now for the English Emba.s.sy, across the Wilhelms Platz and down the Wilhelmstra.s.se four or five blocks to the north. From afar I heard the rumble of a mob, not a singing cheering mob such as had been turning Berlin into bedlam for a week before, but a mob obviously bent on more serious business. I reached the Behrenstra.s.se, two hundred feet away from the English Emba.s.sy. Though quite dark, I could see plainly what was happening. The Emba.s.sy was besieged by a shouting throng, yelling so savagely that its words were not distinguishable. They were not chanting _Rule, Britannia!_ I was sure of that. It was imprecations, inarticulate but ferocious beyond description, which they were muttering. I saw things hurtling toward the windows. From the crash of gla.s.s which presently ensued, I knew they were hitting their mark. The fusillade increased in violence. When there would be a particularly loud crash, it would be followed by a fiendish roar of glee. The street was crammed from curb to curb. Many women were among the demonstrators. A mounted policeman or two could be seen making no very vigorous effort to interfere with the riot. It was no place for an Englishman, or anybody who, being smooth-shaven, was usually mistaken for one in Berlin. I did not dream of trying to run the blockade. The rear, or Wilhelmstra.s.se, entrance of the Adlon adjoins the Emba.s.sy. It would be easy to gain access to the hotel that way. I tried the door.

It was locked. I rang. One of the light-blue uniformed page-boys came, peered through the gla.s.s, recognized me and fled without letting me in.

I rang again. No one came. Wilhelmstra.s.se now was roaring with the mob's rage. Amba.s.sador Goschen's subsequent report on this cla.s.sic manifestation of _Kultur_ described how he and his staff, seated in the front drawing-room of the Emba.s.sy, narrowly escaped being stoned to death by missiles which now flew thick and fast through every paneless window of the building.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Extra Edition of _Berliner Tageblatt_ Announcing War With England]

I hailed a pa.s.sing horse-cab and told the driver to make for the Adlon by the circuitous route of the Voss-stra.s.se, Koniggratzer-stra.s.se and Brandenburg Gate. Ten minutes later I reached the hotel. I stepped to the desk and asked for Herr Adlon, Sr., or Louis Adlon, his son; said the Wilhelmstra.s.se mob might soon decide to hold an overflow meeting and attack the hotel premises, and that certain precautionary measures might be useful. The lobby of the hotel, I noticed, was rapidly filling up with American war refugees, of whom there was to be a meeting. I recognized a dozen or more anxious compatriots whom I had seen encamped at the Emba.s.sy during the preceding two or three days. The Amba.s.sador was expected, they said, and they were hoping and praying to hear from him that the Government had at last effected adequate rescue arrangements. The frock-coated menial at the hotel desk, only a few hours previous servility itself, was unusually curt when I asked where the Adlons were. I did not think of it at the time, but his rudeness a.s.sumed its proper importance in the scheme of things as they later developed. I stopped to chat with Amba.s.sador Gerard, who had just strolled in. Then I met another acquaintance, Count von Oppersdorff, the urbane Silesian Roman Catholic political leader, a familiar and welcome figure on our Berlin golf links. "So England has come in,"

remarked the Count. "Yes," I rejoined, "you hardly expected her to keep out, did you?" "Well," said Oppersdorff, with a meaningful look in his mild blue eye, "there will be many surprises--many surprises." That was a war prophecy which has come true.

I dashed up to my room to write a dispatch to _The Times_ in New York and _The Tribune_ in Chicago, which should tell briefly of the outbreak of war between England and Germany, and of the extraordinary scenes in front of His Britannic Majesty's emba.s.sy. A _Lokal-Anzeiger_ "extra" was now available, with this "cooked" summary of the events which had precipitated the climacteric decision:

+----------------------------------------------------+ ENGLAND HAS DECLARED WAR ON GERMANY! OFFICIAL REPORT. This afternoon, shortly after the speech of the Imperial Chancellor, in which the offense against international law involved in our setting foot on Belgian territory was frankly acknowledged and the will of the German Empire to make good the consequences was affirmed, the British Amba.s.sador, Sir Edward Goschen, appeared in the Reichstag to convey to Foreign Secretary von Jagow a communication from his Government. In this communication the German Government was asked to make an immediate reply to the question whether it could give the a.s.surance that no violation of Belgian neutrality would take place. The Foreign Secretary forthwith replied that this was not possible, and again explained the reasons which compel Germany to secure herself against an attack by the French army across Belgian soil. Shortly after seven o'clock the British Amba.s.sador appeared at the Foreign Office to declare war and demand his pa.s.sports. We are informed that the German Government has placed military necessities before all other considerations, notwithstanding that it had, in consequence thereof, to reckon that either ground or pretext for intervention would be given to the English Government. +----------------------------------------------------+

It was this news--reiterating by the printed word what the Chancellor had unblushingly announced in the Reichstag: that military necessities had taken precedence of "all other considerations," including honor--which aroused the ferocity of the mob and incited it, amid mad maledictions on "perfidious Albion," to vent its fury by attempting to wreck the English Emba.s.sy. This German "official report," moreover, besides distorting the facts so as to place the onus for the outbreak of hostilities exclusively upon England, deliberately misstated the object of Sir Edward Goschen's visit to the Foreign Office. As we know from his famous dispatch on the last phase, he did not "appear" there "to declare war." England's declaration of war, as a matter of historical record, was not made until eleven P.M., or midnight Berlin time. The a.s.sault on the Emba.s.sy by _Kultur's_ knife-throwing, stone-hurling and window-breaking cohorts was in full progress by nine o'clock. It began almost immediately after Sir Edward Goschen's return from his celebrated farewell interview with the Imperial Chancellor--the torrid quarter of an hour in which von Bethmann Hollweg, incapable of concealing Germany's rage over the wrecking of her war scheme, blackened the Teutonic escutcheon for all time by branding the Belgian treaty of neutrality as a "sc.r.a.p of paper." Of all egregious words which have fallen from the lips of German "diplomats," von Bethmann Hollweg's immortal indiscretions of that day will live longest, to his own and his country's ineffaceable shame.

While at work on my dispatches in my hotel room--it was now about nine o'clock--I could hear _Unter den Linden_ below my windows roaring with mob fury against Britain. "_Kramer-volk!_" (Peddler nation!) "_Ra.s.sen-Verrat!_" (Race treachery!) "_Nieder mit England!_" (Down with England!) "_Tod den Englander!_" (Death to the English!) were the shouts which burst forth in mad chorus. I have never hunted beasts in the jungle. Never have my ears been smitten with the snarl and growl of wild animals at bay. I never heard the horizon ring with the tumult of howling dervishes plunging fanatically to the attack. But the populace of Berlin seemed to me at that moment to be giving a vivid composite imitation of them all. Certainly no civilized community on earth ever surrendered so completely to all-obsessing brute fury as the war mob which thirsted for British blood in "Athens-on-the-Spree" on the night of August 4, 1914. It gave vent to all the animal pa.s.sions and breathed the murder instinct said to be inherent in the average human when unreasoning rage temporarily supplants sanity. If it had caught sight of or could have laid hands on Sir Edward Goschen, or any one else identifiable as an Englander, it would undoubtedly have torn him limb from limb. The Germans may not be the modern personification of the Huns, but the savagery to which their Imperial capital ruthlessly resigned itself on the threshold of war with England justifies the belief that they have inherited some of the characteristics of Attila's fiends. Next morning's Berlin papers explained in all seriousness, on police authority, that the mob "infuriated" because persons in the English Emba.s.sy had thrown "beggars' pennies" from the windows--a ludicrous falsehood.

Half an hour later I came down-stairs to motor to the Main Telegraph Office with my American cables. No sooner had I stepped to the threshold of the hotel than three policemen grabbed me--one pinioning my right arm, another my left, and the third gripping me by the back of the neck.

All around the hotel entrance stood gesticulating Germans yelling, like Comanche Indians, "_Englischer Spion! Nach Spandau mit ihm!_" (English spy! To Spandau with him!) In far less time than it takes me to tell it, my captors, who had now drawn their sabers to "protect" me, as they explained, from the murderous intentions of the mob, tossed me into the rear seat of an open taxicab waiting at the curb. They allowed sufficient time to elapse for the mob, which now encircled the cab shouting "_Englischer Hund!_" (English dog!) "_Schiesst den Spion!_"

(Shoot the spy!) and other cheery greetings, to cool its pa.s.sions on my hapless head and body with fisticuffs and canes, while a misdirected upper-cut from a youth, aimed squarely at my jaw, did nothing but knock my hat into the bottom of the car and send my eye-gla.s.ses splintered and spinning to the same destination. The police, still covering me with their sabers, shoved me to the floor of the car and gave orders to the driver to make post-haste for the Mittel-stra.s.se police station, half a dozen blocks away. The power of speech having temporarily returned--I wonder if my readers will regard it a humiliating confession if I acknowledge that cold chills were now chasing up and down my spine?--I ventured to ask the policemen to whom or to what I was indebted for this "striking" token of their solicitude.

"You know perfectly well why you're here," replied the giant who was gripping me by the right arm as if I might be contemplating escape from the lower regions of the taxi by falling through or flying away. "The mob heard the Adlon was full of English spies, and they were waiting for you to come out. They'd have killed you on the spot if we hadn't been there to rescue you." That was, of course, simply an absurd lie, as fast-crowding events of the succeeding night were to demonstrate. I was arrested because I had been denounced, in all formality, as a spy. If the German authorities are inclined to a.s.sert the contrary, I refer them, without permission, to the doc.u.ment reproduced opposite this page--the official and original denunciation obligingly slipped by mistake into my handbag of personal belongings at the Police-Presidency later in the night, when, on the demand of the American Amba.s.sador, I was precipitately released from custody. Doctor Otto Sprenger, of Bremen, was one of the police spies stationed either in the Hotel Adlon, or at a wire therewith connected, to overhear conversations, and who, in the hour of his country's extremities, struck a herculean blow for Kaiser and Empire by catching Mackenzie (Kingsley is as near as he could get the name) and myself in our telephonic plot to frustrate Germany's war plans.

I was still remonstrating with the police about the absurdity of my arrest when the taxi pulled up in front of Mittel-stra.s.se station.

Evidently news of our impending arrival had preceded us, for another gang of shouting patriots was a.s.sembled in front of the station and proceeded to bestow upon me the same sort of a welcome as I received at the hands of the mob in Unter den Linden. Still "protecting" me with their drawn sabers, my guardians contrived to push and drag me into the station-house and up one flight of stairs to headquarters before the crowd had done anything more serious than crack me over the head and shoulders half a dozen times. I was then led into the back room of the station, where, as I soon saw, pickpockets and other criminals are taken to be stripped and searched, and was ordered to sit down in the midst of a group of twenty policemen, who eyed me with glances mingling contempt and murderous intent.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Facsimile of Original Denunciation of the Author as an "English Spy"]

I had partially recovered my equilibrium after my somewhat exciting experiences of the previous ten minutes and found myself able to talk dispa.s.sionately to a courteous young lieutenant of police who was in charge of the station. I told him I was not only an American, but a long-time resident of Berlin, with a home of my own in Wilmersdorf, and that if he would communicate with his superior, Doctor Henninger, chief of the political police, who had known me for years, he would soon be able to convince himself that a grotesque mistake had been made in arresting me as an "English spy." The lieutenant, who, I should think, was the only man in all Berlin who had not yet entirely lost his reason, asked me politely for my papers and other credentials. I handed him my American pa.s.sport, newly-issued at the Emba.s.sy a few days before, a visiting-card bearing my Berlin home address, one or two copies of my most recent news telegrams to London and New York, which I happened to have with me, my correspondent's identification card stamped by the Berlin police department, and finally a letter which I had been carrying with me during the war crisis for precisely some such emergency--a communication sent me from the Imperial yacht in the summer of 1913, acknowledging in gracious terms a copy of _Men Around the Kaiser_, which William II had deigned to accept at my hands. The police lieutenant almost clicked heels and came to the salute when he saw that his prisoner was the possessor of so priceless a doc.u.ment. He asked me to "calm" myself and await developments. "_Es wird schon gut sein._"

Which in real language means that "everything will be all right."

As their superior officer had not lopped off my head on sight, and even condescended to hold courteous converse with the "spy," the group of policemen in whose midst I found myself now warmed up to me perceptibly.

"You are an American, eh?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed one of them. "I wonder if you know my brother in Minnesota? His name is Paul Richter."

I was genuinely sorry I had never met Herr Richter--probably he did not live in the Red River Valley, which was the only part of Minnesota I knew, I explained. I knew some Richters in my native county of La Porte, Indiana, but they had never claimed the honor, to my knowledge, of having a brother in the Kaiser's police. While _Schutzmann_ Richter and I were doing our best to discover that the world is small, noise of fresh commotion, such as had greeted my own arrival at the station, ascended from the street. Apparently a fresh "bag" had come in. A second later, of all people on earth, who should be pushed into the room, with three policemen at his neck and arms, but my very disheveled friend, Tower. He was hatless, his collar and tie were awry, every hair of his Goethe-like blond head was on end, and he cut altogether the figure of a very much perturbed young man. There were no mirrors about, so I can not say with certainty how I myself looked, but I am sure I could have easily been mistaken for Tower's twin at that moment.

Partners in misery and anxiety we certainly were. Tower, it appeared, was denounced to the spy-hunters at the Adlon by a chauffeur he had engaged to drive him a day or two before--the man who piloted the machine which was hired out to Adlon guests at fancy rates per hour.

Presently the chauffeur himself bounded into the room, shouting like a madman. "Now we've got him--the d.a.m.ned English cur!" he snarled, shaking his fist, first in Tower's face, and then, recognizing me, in mine, with an oath and a "You, too, pig-dog!" The chauffeur now ranted his reasons for denouncing both Tower and me. "I'm an old African soldier!" he yelled. "I know these contemptible _Englander_. This Tower (he called it Toever, which was the way Germans used phonetically to p.r.o.nounce a former American amba.s.sador's name) is the notorious _Times_ correspondent!" Tower impetuously denied this soft impeachment, and pointed out that instead of being the Thunderer's representative, he was the correspondent of the _Daily News_, "the only Germanophile English newspaper." Tower himself was never Germanophile, but it was grasping at a legitimate straw so to describe his London paper. I could not conscientiously identify _The Daily Mail_ as _deutschfreundlich_, or, I regretfully mused, it might be the means of saving my neck.

Now there was more noise from the lower regions. Whom had they nabbed this time. Astonished as I was to see Tower marched in, I fairly gasped when the newest batch of prisoners was shoved into the room, for it was headed by my young secretary, Schrape, and included Mrs. Hensel, a gray-haired German-American lady and an old Berlin friend of my family, and Miles Bouton, of the local staff of the a.s.sociated Press. Schrape and Mrs. Hensel had been denounced at the Adlon as my accomplices in espionage--Schrape for obvious reasons, and Mrs. Hensel because she had called to see me at the hotel a few minutes after my arrest, undoubtedly, of course, to bring me illicit information or receive her "orders." She had come, as a matter of fact, as countless acquaintances of mine had been doing throughout the week, to ask for advice or a.s.sistance in the midst of the topsy-turvy conditions into which life in Berlin had been so suddenly plunged. Schrape was remarkably cool. So was Bouton, who insisted upon expressing himself with such freedom about the indignities heaped upon him that I momentarily expected to witness his decapitation. Mrs. Hensel, poor soul, was frightened speechless and between her tears could only incoherently make me understand that she had no sooner asked for my name at the Adlon desk than the clerks handed her over to the police. Bouton seemed to owe his arrest to the fact that he was in Tower's company in the Adlon lobby, attending the meeting of American war refugees. Tower had been savagely cracked over the head by an Adlon waiter armed with a tray while being hustled out of the hotel by the police. Mrs. Bouton, tearfully protesting against her husband's arrest, had herself been threatened with arrest or something worse if she did not instantly "hold her mouth." Just what part the Adlon staff of clerks, porters, waiters and page-boys played in our arrest was not made clear to me until the next day; of which more in the succeeding chapter.

As soon as the "gang of spies," as the policemen in the room now pleasantly called us, was complete, Tower, Schrape and Bouton were lined up against the wall and ordered to raise their hands above their heads, while their clothes were searched for concealed weapons or incriminating espionage evidence. While my fellow prisoners (except Mrs. Hensel) were undergoing examination, a typical young Berlin thug, evidently a thief, was brought in, and took his place adjacent to my colleagues, also to be searched. The room was now resounding with encouraging shouts from overwrought policemen that "the English dogs ought to be hanged."

Others suggested that "Spandau," the spy-shooting gallery, was a more appropriate place for us than the gallows. For some G.o.d-willed or other mysterious reason I was not searched. That gave me only temporary relief, for we were presently informed that we would be taken to the Police-Presidency (central station) for the night and "dealt with there." That meant searching of everybody, I felt morally sure, and it was then that the tongue of me began cleaving to the roof of my mouth, while my throat parched with terror. For in a leather card-case in my inside pocket I carried a telegraph code, utterly innocuous in itself--a make-shift affair got up during the preceding forty-eight hours and of which I posted a duplicate to London, with a view to explaining to my editor in cipher my movements and whereabouts if I had suddenly to leave Berlin. It was a quite harmless string of phrases reading like this:

"My wife's condition has become critical, and physicians recommend immediate departure if catastrophe is to be avoided."

All this was, of course, in German, and meant (as the code explained) that I was proceeding to the Hotel Angleterre in Copenhagen. Another phrase subst.i.tuted "boy's" for "wife's" and meant that I was leaving for the Hotel Amstel in Amsterdam, etc., etc. It dawned instantly upon me that if the Berlin political police, at such a witching hour, discovered on a suspected spy a telegraphic code of so "incriminating" a character, he could hardly look forward to anything beyond the regulation thrill at sunrise. I might have been able to explain in prosaic peace-times, I soliloquized, that many newspaper correspondents use private codes in communicating with their editors, but to convince a Berlin police official at that moment that my code was of innocent import struck me as the quintessence of physical impossibility.

I was undergoing, I think, all the emotions of fear and trembling when our quintette of prisoners was now marched down to the street and piled into taxis for transportation to the _Polizei-Prasidium_ in Alexander-Platz, two miles across town. An enormous throng filled the Mittel-stra.s.se, snarling with rage. The sight of us maddened them into a fiendish scream. Tower and I were pushed into the first car, which happened to be the Adlon machine he had hired and was doubtless still paying for, and which was driven by his infuriated chauffeur. The "covering" sabers of the police, one each of whom guarded Tower and myself, respectively in the front and back seats, did not prevent the mob from belaboring us once more with fists and sticks, to the accompaniment of unprintable epithets and curses. My mind, however, was occupied completely with how to get rid of that code nestling in my inside pocket. Nothing short of entire insensibility could have deflected my thoughts from that all-absorbing issue. I was thinking hard and quickly.

Tower's chauffeur, proud to be serving the Kaiser on so historic an occasion, did not drive us, as he would naturally and ordinarily have done, through the darkened side streets leading from Mittel-stra.s.se to Alexander-Platz, but decided to drag us in triumph like the victims chained to Nero's chariots, down the brilliantly illuminated _Unter den Linden_, which, though it was now nearly eleven o'clock, was packed with war demonstrators. Crossing to the more crowded southern side, at a point near the Hotel Bristol, the driver threw on his top-speed and whirled us down the glittering boulevard at breakneck pace. As for himself, with a policeman at his side, and two behind him pinioning Tower and myself, he was frantic with super-patriotic joy. Now steering with his left hand, he waved his right madly through s.p.a.ce at the gaping curb crowds, and yelled, so that they might know what it all meant: "English spies! Now we've got 'em! Now we've got 'em! Hurrah!

Hurrah!" It was a great moment in that ill.u.s.trious Kraftwagenfuhrer's career. Nothing in his greasy past had ever approached it in tremendousness. He saw the Iron Cross dangling in certain outlines before his ecstatic vision--the reward for valor in the hour of his Fatherland's need.

I was still brooding over that code, but even while being paraded past the Berliners, I was actively at work on a scheme for its removal.

Necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention, and to this hour I do not fully comprehend how I came to find the courage or ingenuity to do what I was now successfully accomplishing. We had reached the Opera, were approaching the Castle, and Alexander-Platz was less than five minutes away. The need for quick work was growing more urgent from second to second. My policeman held me firmly by the right arm. My left was entirely free. With it I was able easily to reach the right-hand inside pocket of my coat, wherein the card-case containing the code was lodged.

I contrived to finger my way into the case without attracting the attention of my jailer, who, Allah be praised, was still too fascinated by the plaudits of the crowds to be more than mildly interested in me.

I could "feel" the code now. It was of flimsy tissue paper and could be easily torn into shreds. A sufficiently long interval had elapsed since my last visit to the manicure to make my finger-nails highly effective for the purpose, and by degrees which seemed infinitely slow I managed to crumple and dessicate the "guilty" doc.u.ment and by "palming" and working the bits into the s.p.a.ces between my fingers the whole thing was effectually destroyed. I withdrew my hand, stuck it into the outside left-hand pocket of my coat to withdraw a handkerchief, blew my nose and, while in that unforbidden act, let I don't know how many hundreds of tissue paper particles fly back of me into the wind of Berlin's bristling night air. I was saved. They could search me now to their hearts' content. I found that, somehow or other, the power of speech had suddenly returned, and a moment later I was saying cheerily to my _Schutzmann_ friend, "Well, we're here now."

The details of what happened in the big room of the Police-Presidency into which we were now ushered--my friend Simons, of the _Amsterdam Telegraaf_, and Nevinson, special correspondent of _The Daily News_, who were found in Tower's room at the Adlon and arrested on that "evidence,"

had arrived there before us--are brief and unessential. What had been taking place during the preceding two hours is vastly more to the point.

Amba.s.sador Gerard, who was at the Adlon when we were arrested, seems to have cleared for action in his typically shirt-sleeves diplomatic fashion. He dispatched First Secretary Grew to the Foreign Office to demand our instantaneous release. Grew informed Under-Secretary Zimmermann that if Germany continued to treat American citizens and newspaper correspondents in accordance with the practises of the Middle Ages (Conger was still languishing in jail at Gumbinnen) the Fatherland was dangerously likely to lose the esteem of the only first-cla.s.s Power in the world which seemed still to be on speaking terms with her. Herr Zimmermann, who understands plain English when it is spoken to him, was apologetic in the extreme. He told Grew that immediate steps would be taken to liberate me and my friends and that the Foreign Office "regretted" that such indignities should have been heaped upon innocent persons. Mr. Gerard evidently determined to take no chances, for the first secretary was dispatched to the Police-Presidency with the emba.s.sy automobile, and with instructions to demand our delivery in the flesh and stay there till it was made. Meantime the Foreign Office had sent urgent telephonic instructions to the police to let us out. We were asked to fill up certain identification forms and exhibit some more papers, and then, in accents of courteous explanation, were a.s.sured that an "error" had unfortunately been made. We should "not hesitate, if anybody molested us again," to call up Police Headquarters, and matters would be speedily set right. It was not probable, we were a.s.sured, that we would have any more trouble. If we desired, a police escort was at our service, so that we might return to the hotel or to the Emba.s.sy in certain safety.

We had just been bowed out of the place of our brief detention when the familiar outlines of "Joe" Grew loomed into view, down the corridor, and with him "Fritz," the German "life-guard" of the Emba.s.sy. It is not customary for American men to kiss each other, but I confess here to having been momentarily inspired with a strong temptation to lavish some form of osculatory grat.i.tude upon Grew. Certainly I felt that there was nothing quite so good on G.o.d's footstool just then as to be an American citizen. When Grew insisted on packing all five of us--Tower, Mrs.

Hensel, Bouton, Schrape and myself--into the car and driving us back to the Emba.s.sy (it was now the romantic hour of one A.M.) behind the protecting folds of the Stars and Stripes flapping defiantly at the windshield, I vowed a solemn, silent oath--to aspire in such days as might still be left to me for an opportunity some day to reciprocate in kind the service the Amba.s.sador and Grew had that night rendered me, the supreme service men can render a fellow man--to save his life.

They were to be called upon, though I did not then know it, to rescue me once again before either they or I were twenty-four hours older.

CHAPTER XI

THE LAST FAREWELL

Such sleep as I enjoyed in what remained of the night between August 4 and 5 was secured, for the first time in a week, beneath my own roof. I had finished with the "hospitality" of the Hotel Adlon for all time to come. After a brief visit at the Emba.s.sy, to a.s.sure the Amba.s.sador of my everlasting grat.i.tude for having thrown out the life-line, and seeing Mrs. Hensel safely started for her home in Charlottenburg under trusted escort, I betook myself to Wilmersdorf, where our faithful little German governess, Anna Kranz, had been holding the fort all summer during the absence of my family in the United States. I telephoned Fraulein from the Emba.s.sy a summary of the night's events, fearing that police minions might be paying me a domiciliary visit and cause the poor girl unnecessary alarm. I told her Schrape was coming home with me for the night and that as neither of us had had a bite since the preceding noon, we could do full justice to anything, however frugal, which might at that romantic hour still be discoverable in the larder. It was a wide-eyed, then tearful and always sympathetic Thuringian damsel, who listened to our story over bread and cheese at the romantic hour of two-thirty A.M. I can hear her now interrupting with a characteristic and condoling "_Aber, Herr Wile!_"

Having dispatched Schrape to the Adlon early next day to pay my bill and fetch the belongings I had had so abruptly to leave behind me there the night before, I proceeded to town. At the Emba.s.sy was a host of friends anxious for news of me. The most absurd rumors, it seemed, were in circulation. There was a detailed version of my last moments in front of a firing-squad at Spandau, and somebody "who had a friend at the Police Presidency" had told somebody else that I was in shackles which would probably not be removed till the war was over--if then. Still another tale related circ.u.mstantially of how I had been "hurried" from Berlin at the dead of night, under military guard, to the Dutch frontier, across which, by this time, I was unceremoniously "expelled."

When I was able to gain the ear of the Amba.s.sador--the American war-refugee panic was now at tempestuous zenith, with the Emba.s.sy like a place besieged--I represented to him that I feared my hopes of remaining in Germany, after what had happened, were slender in the extreme.

Scouts had brought in the intelligence, I informed him, that a miniature mob of evident purpose was waiting in front of the Equitable Building, where _The Daily Mail_ office was, now and then knowingly pointing to our big gilt window-sign, in order that pa.s.sers-by might understand why traffic was being blocked in front of No. 59 Friedrichstra.s.se. If the crowd waited long enough, it probably saw at work the sign men whom I had ordered to take down the red rag. Discretion is ever the better part of valor, and I felt no compelling desire to superintend the job in person.

The Amba.s.sador thought I was unduly disturbed. He was convinced that my arrest was purely an unfortunate blunder, due to a combination of officious patriotism and excessive zeal, and meant nothing. I was inclined to agree with him. Berlin and the Berliners had suddenly lost their minds, and nothing which occurs when a community of men are in a state of mental aberration ought in reason to be charged against them.

I had obviously fallen victim to the ma.s.s _dementia_ which robbed Germans of their senses when their lingering fears of war with England became terrifying actuality. I certainly did not overestimate the importance of the episode.

I now ran across von Wiegand of the _United Press_ (as he then was) and Swing, of the _Chicago Daily News_. Being Americans, like myself, they had just taken the precaution of applying to the Foreign Office for credentials which would protect them from such delicate attentions as the police had shown me. They suggested that I should see _Legationsrat_ Heilbron and get an _Ausweiskarte_. Swing was in jubilant mood. He had a scheme under promising way to accompany Major Langhorne, our military attache, to the front as a "secretary." My heart pumped with envy. Von Wiegand had not yet worked out his forthcoming campaign for interviewing the German Empire and the Vatican, but all of us felt sure that his German n.o.ble origin, plus his nose for news and excellent official connections, would land Karl Heinrich on his feet, as far as reporting the war was concerned, if any one was going to be favored at all. The Anglo-American newspaper fraternity was already a rather decimated body. Conger, of the a.s.sociated Press, was still jailed at Gumbinnen. Wilc.o.x, of _The Daily Telegraph_, had been fortunate enough, only a few days previous, to get to Russia. Ford, of _The Morning Post_, had not waited for the crash and left for England on one of the last peace-time trains. Tower, my night's partner in woe, had slept in the porter's bas.e.m.e.nt of the American Emba.s.sy and was now a refugee in the British Emba.s.sy, where, I understood, all the other purely English correspondents were being rounded up during the day, to accompany Sir Edward Goschen and his staff out of Germany next morning on the safe-conduct train provided by the German government. Mackenzie, of _The Times_, with whom I had plotted by telephone, was still unarrested, for some miraculous reason; I had not yet seen the original "denunciation" of our espionage operations, from which I later knew that he had only been identified as "Kingsley." He can blame that circ.u.mstance, no doubt, for having been denied the privilege of my own experiences.

At five o'clock, the customary hour for newspaper men to visit the Foreign Office, I went to call on _Legationsrat_ Heilbron. He had not yet come in, so I sent my card to his colleague, _Legationsrat_ Esternaux, with whom I had enjoyed professional acquaintance ever since the hour of my arrival in Germany, thirteen years previous to the week.

I a.s.sured Esternaux that I cherished no particular animosity toward the police authorities for my silly arrest, being convinced that a grotesque mistake alone was responsible. Mildly apologetic, he acquiesced in this view.

"You were a victim," Esternaux then began, "of our just and universal rage over the treacherous and treasonable action of England in stabbing us in the back. Never, as long as they live, will Germans forgive the perfidy of the British Government in betraying the common blood in favor of uncivilized Pan-Slavism. It is the most criminal faithlessness in the world's history--this taking advantage of our difficulties to vent long pent-up spite against the merely dangerous German commercial rival." Herr Esternaux did not mention Belgium, though the flow of his righteous indignation was increasing from phrase to phrase. "Race treason! That is what has fired the German soul to its depths! That is what caused last night's unseemly demonstrations. n.o.body condones mob fury less than the German Government, but it is explained, if not justified, by what has happened. Of one thing the world may be sure--with whatever bitterness we make war on our Russian and French foes, it will be nothing--it will be child's-play--compared to the spirit of revengeful rancor and holy wrath in which we shall fight the English race-traitors. That was the temper of the Berlin mob last night.

It is the temper in which we are going to war with Great Britain. It is the temper in which we shall wage the struggle with her to the bitter end. Make no mistake about that." I had listened, on the authoritative premises of the Imperial German Government, to perhaps the first official proclamation of the hate and frightfulness programme so far uttered. _Gott strafe England_! How graphically succeeding events were to bear it out!