The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time

Cover

Ambassador Gerard.

THE ASSAULT

Germany Before the Outbreak and
England in War-Time

A Personal Narrative

By
FREDERIC WILLIAM WILE

Author of "Men Around the Kaiser"

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS AND FACSIMILES OF
DOCUMENTS AND CARTOONS

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT 1916
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

To
AMBASSADOR AND MRS. GERARD

LIFE-SAVERS

IN GRATITUDE

INTRODUCTION

This is not a "war book." It has not been my privilege at any stage of the Great Blood-Letting to come into close contact with the spectacular clash and din of the fray. Abler pens than mine, many of them wielded by the "neutral" hands of American colleagues, are immortalizing the terrible, yet irresistibly fascinating, scenes of this most stupendous drama. But every drama has its scenario and its prologue and its behind-the-curtain scenes--none ever written was so rich in these preliminaries and accessories as is Europe's epic. To have witnessed and lived through some of these was vouchsafed me; and to take American readers with me down the line of the past year's recollections and impressions is the sole object of this unpretentious effort. History, Carlyle said, was some one's record of personal experiences. To such experiences, as far as possible, the pages of this book are confined.

For thirteen years to the week--I have always had a respectful horror of thirteen--I was a resident of Berlin. During the first five years of that period my identity was clear: I was the representative in Germany of an American newspaper, the Chicago Daily News. But in 1906 I became an international complication, for it was then I joined the staff of the London Daily Mail, which converted my status into that of an American serving British journalistic interests in Germany. It was not long afterward that welcome opportunity presented itself to renew home professional ties in connection with my British work, and for several years prior to the outbreak of the war I carried the credentials of Berlin correspondent of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. They were on my person, with my United States passport, the night of August 4, 1914, when the Kaiser's police arrested me as an "English spy."

I feel it necessary to introduce so highly personal a narrative with these details in order to make plain, at the outset, that it is the narrative of an American born and bred. My proudest boast during ten years' association with Great Britain's premier newspaper organization was that I never lost my Americanism. My English editor, on the occasion of my earliest physical conflict with the Mailed Fist in Berlin, doubtless recalls taking me to task for invoking the protection of the United States Embassy, just as my British colleagues, concerned in the same imbroglio, had invoked the aid of their Embassy. Of the reams I have written for the Daily Mail in my day, I never sent it anything which sprang more sincerely from the heart than the message to its editor that I had not renounced allegiance to my country when I pledged my professional services to a British newspaper.

I have no higher aspiration, as far as this volume is concerned, than that critics of it, hostile or friendly, may pronounce it "pro-Ally" from start to finish. I shall survive even the charge that it is "pro-English." I mean it to be all of that, as I have tried to breathe sincerity into every line of it. But I shall not feel inclined to accept without protest an accusation that the book is "anti-German." It is true that I regard this essentially a German-made, or rather a Prussian-made, war, and that I hold Prussian militarism and militarists solely responsible for plunging the world into this unending bath of blood and tears. It is true that I wish to see Germany beaten. I wish her beaten for the Allies' sake and for my own country's sake. A victorious Germany would be a menace to international liberty and become automatically a threat to the happiness and freedom of the United States. My years in Germany taught me that. But I cherish no scintilla of hatred or animosity toward the German people as individuals, who will be the real victims of the war. I saw them with my own eyes literally dragged into the fight against their will, fears and judgment. I know from their own lips that they considered it a cruelly unnecessary war and did not want it. They were joyful and prosperous a year and a half ago--never more so. They craved a continuance of the simple blessings of peace, unless their tearful protestations in the fateful month preceding the drawing of their mighty sword were the plaints of a race of hypocrites, and I do not think the percentage of hypocrisy higher in Germany, man for man, than elsewhere in the world. The German's Gott strafe England cult, for example, is no revelation to any man who has lived among them. Their hatred for Perfidious Albion has long been vigorous and purposeful.

During the war I have lived in Germany, England and the United States--a week of it in Berlin, three months at different periods in America, and the rest of the time in London. My observations of Germany have not been confined to the six and a half days the Prussian police permitted me to tarry in their midst, for my work in London has dealt almost exclusively with day-by-day examination of that weird production which will be known to history as the German war-time Press. I am quite sure the perspective of the life and times of the Kaiser's people in their "great hour" was clearer from the vantage-ground of a newspaper desk near the Thames embankment than it could possibly have been had it been my lot to view the Fatherland at war as an observer writing, under the hypnotic influence of mass-suggestion, of Germany from within.

Though I deal with Britain in war-time, no pretense is made of treating so vast a subject except by way of fleeting impressions. Indeed, nothing but snap-shots of British life are possible at the moment, so kaleidoscopic are its developments and vagaries. I am conscious that the pictures I have drawn are, therefore, superficial, but no portrayal of a people in a state of flux could well be otherwise. Although the concluding chapters were written in October, conditions now (in mid-December) have altered vitally in many directions. Sir John French no longer commands the British Army in France and Flanders. Serbia has gone the way of Belgium. Gallipoli has been abandoned. The Coalition Government, established at the end of May, is widely considered a failure at the end of December. The Man in the Street, that oracle of all-wisdom in these Isles, is asking whether the war can be won without still another, and more sweeping, change of National leadership.

I hope my British friends, and particularly my professional colleagues of ten years' standing, will not find my snap-shots too under-exposed. The camera was in pro-British hands every minute of the time. If the pictures appear indistinct, I trust the photography will at least not be criticized as in any respect due to lack of sympathy with the British cause.

F. W. W.
London, December 20, 1915.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

1. [The Curtain Raiser]
2. [The First Act]
3. [The Plot Develops]
4. [The Stage Managers]
5. [Slow Music]
6. [The Climax]
7. [War]
8. [The Americans]
9. [August Fourth]
10. [The War Reaches Me]
11. [The Last Farewell]
12. [Safe Conduct]
13. [Complacency Rules The Waves]
14. [Pro-Ally Uncle Sam]
15. [The Helmsmen]
16. [The General, The Admiral and the King]
17. ["Your King And Country Want You"]
18. [War in the Dark]
19. [The Internal Foe]
20. [The Empire of Hate]
21. [The New England]
22. [Quo Vadis?]

New Introductory Chapter

HOW EUROPE VIEWS AMERICAN INTERVENTION

It will hardly be possible for any faithful chronicler of that transcendent event to record that America's entry into the war set embattled Europe by the ears. The most such a historian can say of the impression created in Allied countries is that the abandonment of our neutrality toward the "natural foe to liberty" produced profound satisfaction but nothing in the way of a staggering sensation. Even in Germany and among her vassals, declaration of war by the United States failed to provoke consternation, although it was received in a spirit of nonchalance which was more studied than real. The Damoclean sword of Washington had hung so long in the mid-air of indecision that when the blow fell its effect was to a large extent lost upon beneficiary and victim alike. The peoples who became our Allies were gratified; the Germans mortified. But our leap into the arena stained with nearly three years of combatant blood was so belated that it seemed bereft of the power to plunge either our friends into paroxysms of enthusiasm or our enemies into the depths of despair.

I am speaking exclusively of the first impressions generated by President Wilson's call to arms. In Allied Europe, as well as Germanic Europe, opinion is changing, now that the words of April are merging into the deeds of midsummer. Still different emotions will fire the breasts of both our comrades-in-arms and of the common foe when the full magnitude of American intervention dawns upon their reluctant consciousness. As yet the illimitable import of America's "coming in" is only faintly realized. Europe's attitude toward the new belligerent is too strongly intrenched in decade-old disbelief in the existence of American idealism and in gross ignorance of our actual potentialities for war, spiritual as well as physical, to be lightly abandoned. We shall have to win our spurs. There is at this writing no inclination whatever to present them to us on trust.

In the introduction to the original edition of The Assault, which was completed at the end of 1915, I was un-neutral enough to utter the pious hope that Germany would be beaten. I confessed to the creed that "a victorious Germany would be a menace to international liberty and become automatically a threat to the happiness and freedom of the United States." I said that "my years in Germany taught me that"--years lived in closest contact with Prussian militarism long before it had taken the concrete form of savagery at sea. With that passion for corroboration of his own prejudices and predictions, which is inherent in the average man, and which dominates most writers, I rejoice to feel that our government and country have at length joined in liberty's fray from the identical motives which induced me at the outset to take the only side that it seemed possible for an American to espouse.

Properly to analyze Europe's mentality in respect of the United States' entry into the war we need to bear in mind that for the thirty-two preceding months President Wilson was the riddle of the political universe. Europe had been assured ceaselessly since August, 1914, that America was overwhelmingly and irretrievably pro-Ally, though its confidence in such assertions was shipwrecked when we failed to go to war over the Lusitania incident and was never fully restored. Not even Berlin could reconcile the Washington government's invincible neutrality with the alleged existence of universal counter-sentiment. Europeans are educated to believe that public opinion is the only monarch to whom the American citizenry owns allegiance. They were unable to comprehend a president who so resolutely refused to bow to the people's sovereign will. In its myopic misconception of American conditions, Allied Europe indulged in grotesque misinterpretation of Mr. Wilson's hesitancy and mystic diplomacy. He had been "re-elected by German votes." In London Americans were solemnly asked if the true explanation of his policy did not lie in the fact that he had "a German wife!" It was also mooted that he had "a secret understanding" with Count Bernstorff. The president was this, that and the other thing--everything, in fact, except what he ought to be. No American chief magistrate since Lincoln was ever so magnificently misunderstood, none so incorrigibly maligned.

Thus it was that although the United States' action under President Wilson's sagacious leadership did not fill Europe with either animation or excitement, it nevertheless came as a full-fledged surprise to both sets of belligerents. Briton, Frenchman, Russian and Italian, as well as German, Austrian and Hungarian, each in his own dogmatic way, had long since and definitely made up their minds that America did not mean to fight. Their cocksureness on this cardinal point was not unnaturally supported by the circumstances of President Wilson's re-election on what was commonly understood to be the democratic candidate's paramount campaign issue--his success in keeping the country out of the war. In the two or three days in which Mr. Wilson's fate trembled in the balance of the Electoral College, a London newspaper, venting splenitic feelings long pent up, gratefully acclaimed the premature announcement of Mr. Hughes' triumph as an historic and deserved rebuke of the statesman who was "too proud to fight."

Within a month President Wilson, in his first public utterance since election day, made his "peace-without-victory" address to the Senate. This cryptic deliverance was interpreted in Allied Europe as not only obliterating all possibility of America's entering the war against Germany, but as actually promoting Germany's efforts, launched about the same time, to secure a premature, or "German," peace. There was probably no time during the entire war when feeling against the president and the United States in general ran higher in England and France than during the ensuing weeks. It was not so much what one read in the public prints, for press utterances were restrained if not unqualifiedly friendly, that impelled many an American in London and Paris to seek cover from the withering blast of criticism and impatience to which he now found his country subjected. It was rather the sentiments encountered among Englishmen and Frenchmen in private that supplied the real index to, and revealed the full intensity of, the disappointment and indignation now aroused in Allied lands.

Indelibly impressed upon my memory is the passionate outburst of a dear--and, of course, temperamental--French friend in London. He is a gentleman, a scholar and sincere lover of America, where he found the charming lady who is now his wife. He had retired to a bed of illness in consequence of the climatic iniquities which will forever make it impossible for a Frenchman ever really to like England, and I was paying him a neighborly visit of inquiry. Though I had hoped and intended that the acrimonious topic of America would for once be eliminated from our conversation, I was not to be spared what turned out to be almost the most violent castigation of the United States and all its works under which I could ever remember to have winced. I was left in no doubt that his outpouring of righteous Gallic wrath, though it sprang to a certain degree from temperature as well as temperament, was the voice of France crying out in holy anger with the great but recreant sister republic. Wilson had "surrendered to the Germans and pro-Germans." They were now getting their reward. The president was "playing the Kaiser's peace game." He may not have meant to do so, but that is what his Senate manifesto amounted to, in French estimation. "The Americans care only for their money." So be it. France would not forget. Jamais! Americans would rue the day they had sent back to the White House the man who was now stabbing crucified democracy in the back!

The essential difference between the French and the English is that Frenchmen usually say what they feel, and Englishmen feel what they do not say. Emotions were given to Frenchmen to be expressed; to Englishmen, to be suppressed. Almost identically the same emotions which fired the French soul, as typified by the instance I have just cited, filled British breasts, but owing to the psychic machinery with which his organism is equipped the Englishman was able more successfully to stifle them. The public tone toward the latest manifestation of our "war policy" was punctiliously correct. It was discussed by the great newspapers in terms of polite dismay but almost invariably in good temper. Yet millions of Britons were boiling within, and if wearing their hearts on their sleeves had been "good form," there is little reason to doubt that their ebullitions would have been no less articulate or meaningful than those of my distinguished French friend herein narrated.

It was about at this time, the end of 1916, that an American colleague, Edward Price Bell, of The Chicago Daily News, set forth in the columns of The Times upon a bold adventure--an attempt to persuade captious Britons that, far from desiring to "play the Kaiser's game," President Wilson was actually anxious to make war on Germany, and, indeed, was deliberately, as was his way, proceeding in that direction. It was a risky throw for the doyen of the American press in London, who enjoyed a reputation for sanity and sagacity and who had good reason for desiring to preserve the respect of a community in which his professional lot had been cast for sixteen years. I purpose summarizing the course of Bell's effort to scale the walls of British prejudice because of its immensely symptomatic and psychological interest.

"I believe that Wilson wants to go to war," Bell wrote to The Times on December 23. "I believe that he wants to fight Germany. I believe that he wants Germany to commit herself to a program that would warrant him in asking the American people to enter the conflict." In every allied quarter in Europe, practically without exception, Bell's letter produced a prodigious and contemptuous guffaw. Americans in Europe, any number of them, joined in the gibes. Undismayed, Bell returned to the attack within three days. "America can not keep out of this war unless Germany gives way," he wrote on December 26. "The time may come very soon when President Wilson will be under the necessity of making his appeal to the American nation." The thunderer did not consign Bell's letters to the editorial waste-basket, where most Englishmen believed they belonged, yet it declined, in its scrupulously courteous way, to associate itself with its correspondent's manifestly fantastic and fanatical sophistry. In an editorial comment The Times expressed its reluctance to place any trust in Bell's exposition of the policy "which Mr. Wilson so carefully wraps up." Bell had by this time become a laughing-stock far beyond the confines of the metropolitan area of London. Paris, Petrograd and Rome read his letters and shook with incredulous mirth. The feelings of fellow-Americans toward him began to be tinged with pity.

Yet Bell broke forth afresh on New Year's Day with his third letter to Printing House Square, asserting, roundly, that "America will and can support no peace but an Entente peace." On January 25 The Times printed Bell's fourth letter within five weeks, in which he this time declared unequivocally that "Mr. Wilson's purpose is solely to inform the world what America stands for and what he is willing to ask America, if need be, to fight for."

Germany now proclaimed her new policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Mr. Gerard was recalled from Berlin and Count Bernstorff received his passports in Washington. Yet Allied faith in America, momentarily revived by these events, took wings once more when it became known that Mr. Wilson's next "step" would be armed neutrality. The editor of The Times, who had been exceptionally tolerant of the pestiferous Bell, imagined now, I fancy, that events had at length put a timely end to the letter-writing energies of the Chicago scribe; for Englishmen, with notably few exceptions, had by this time pretty well "eliminated" America from their calculations. But on February 22, inspired perhaps by the rugged traditions clinging to that date, Bell cleared for action for the fifth time and next day The Times printed him for the fifth time. He wrote: "I will risk the view that we are on the edge of great things in America--things worthy of the country of Washington and Lincoln. America, I feel, is about to fructify internationally--about to make her real contribution to humanity and history." The Times now went so far as to suggest, with characteristic prudence, that Bell's "sagacious and racy letter deserves careful consideration by all who are trying to understand the situation in Washington." Unhappily, there was little evidence in the continued British mistrust of America that The Times' counsel was being taken widely to heart.

On February 27 Bell craved the indulgence of The Times for his sixth, and final, epistle to the skeptics. With what was destined to turn out to be rare prescience and penetration, he now said that Mr. Wilson's delay in coming to grips with Hohenzollernism meant only that "the president wants the public temper so hot throughout America that it will instantly burn to ash any revolutionary unrest or any opposition by the pacifist diehards." Five weeks later the United States and Germany were at war, with the American nation united in fervent support of the president's pronunciamento that the task which demanded the renunciation of our neutrality was one to which "we can dedicate our lives, our fortunes, everything we are and everything we have." The hour of Europe's awakening from its scornful dreams had come.

For several days after Congress, at the president's instigation, voted to "accept the gage of battle," there lay neatly folded up in a certain front room of the American Embassy in London a fine, new American flag. It had been put there for a special purpose--to be hoisted at a psychological moment believed to be imminent. Our people in Grosvenor Gardens, in their hearty, imaginative American way, considered that there might possibly be a "demonstration" in welcome of Britain's latest comrade-in-arms. There were visions of a procession, brass bands and cheering crowds; and the spick and span stars and stripes were to be flung to the glad breeze when the "demonstrators" reached the scene and called for a speech from Ambassador Page on the Embassy balcony. Such things happened when Italy and Roumania "came in." Surely history would not fail to repeat itself in the case of "daughter America." But neither procession, bands, cheers nor crowds ever materialized. After all, we could not expect Englishmen to celebrate in honor of the greatest mistake they had ever made in their lives. That would be something more than un-English. It would be a violation of all the laws of human nature.

Yet I suppose there was not an American in Great Britain who was not keenly disappointed at the conspicuously undemonstrative character of our welcome into the Allied fold. I must not be understood as minimizing the warmth of either governmental or press utterances evoked by President Wilson's Lincolnesque speech to Congress and the action which so promptly ensued. The sentiments expressed by Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Bonar Law, Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Bryce, in and out of Parliament, and the thoughts which found vivid expression in the columns of the newspapers of London and the provinces left little to be desired; but eloquent and hearty as they were, their effect upon that all-powerful molder of British public opinion known as the Man in the Street was strangely negligible. I am sure I am not the only American in England who, waiting for words of greeting from British friends and not getting them, was irresistibly constrained to search for the reason. Our chagrin was not lessened by assurances from Paris that "France was going wild with joy"; that the president's speech was being read aloud in the schools and officially placarded on all the hoardings of the republic; that the government buildings were flying the tricolor and "Old Glory" side by side; and that American men were being publicly embraced in the boulevards.

Many Americans found themselves, for reasons never entirely clear to them, the objects of "congratulation." I know of at least one instance in which a very estimable American lady, showered with "congratulations" by British friends on the action of her country, preserved sufficient presence of mind to suggest that she thought "congratulations" were due to the Allies. Another favorite view advanced by vox populi was that America had only "come in" at this late stage of the sanguinary game because "the war was won" and intervention now was "safe" and "cheap." It was not uncommon to be told that our determination to "spend the whole force of the nation" was due to commercial acumen and our desire to safeguard the heavy "investment" we had already made in the Allied cause. Last-ditchers--their name was legion: the Englishmen who refused to believe even yet that America "meant business"--declined to throw their hats into the air and shout until "big words" had become "big deeds." Much more impressive in my own ears seemed the explanation that Britons were not tumultuous in our honor because these days of endless sacrifice--the spring offensive in France was at its height and the nation's best were falling in thousands--were not days for cheering and flag-waving. And, finally, there was that extensive school of thought which had always and sincerely opposed American intervention on the ground that America, as a neutral granary and arsenal, was a more effective Allied asset than a belligerent America which would naturally and necessarily husband its vast resources for its own military requirements.

The story of Germany's state of mind toward America's entry into the lists against her is soon told. The German government and German people looked upon us as all but declared enemies throughout the war. They felt, and repeatedly said, that we were doing them quite as much damage as neutrals as we could possibly inflict in the guise of belligerents. That, indeed, was the argument on which Hindenburg and his fellow-strategists based the "safety" of inaugurating unrestricted submarine warfare and the moral certainty of war with the United States as a result. Not all Germans blithely relegated the prospect of a formally hostile America to the realm of inconsequence. Hindenburg and Ludendorff know nothing about America. But men like Ballin, Gwinner, Rathenau and Dernburg know that the United States, in a famous German idiom, is, indeed, "the land of unlimited possibilities." There can be no manner of doubt that the vision of America's limitless resources harnessed to those of the nations already at war with their country always filled the business giants of the Fatherland with all the terror of a nightmare. But as those elements, both before and during the war, were as a voice crying in the wilderness of Prussian militarism, they were condemned to silence when the dreaded thing became a reality; and the only note that issued forth from Berlin was the "inspired" croak in the government-controlled press that only the expected had happened; that Hindenburg's plans had been made with exact regard for that which had now supervened, and that Germany's irresistible march to victory would not and could not be arrested by anything the Americans could do.

Doubts were universally expressed in America and in Allied Europe as to whether the Kaiser's government would permit President Wilson's crushing indictment of Prussianism to be published in Germany. One heard of picturesque schemes to drop millions of copies of the speech over the German trenches and towns from aeroplanes. In at least one widely-read German newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt, a Radical-Liberal journal which has not entirely surrendered its old-time independence, the president's speech was printed almost verbatim. In nearly every paper there were adequate extracts. But such effect as they may have been designed to create upon the German body politic--particularly the president's insistence that America's war is with "the Imperial German Government" and not with "the German people"--was nullified by the press bureau's imperious orders to editors to reject Mr. Wilson's "moral clap-trap" as impudent and insolent interference with Germany's domestic concerns. Under the leadership of the celebrated Berlin theologian, Professor Doctor Adolf Harnack, meetings of German scholars and savants were organized for the purpose of giving public expression to the "unanimity and indignation with which the German nation protests against the American president's officious intrusion upon matters which are the affair of the German people and themselves alone." Or words to that effect.

Meantime the so-called comic press of Germany, which to an extent probably unknown in any other country of the world gives the keynote for popular sentiment, engaged in an orgy of unbridled abuse of President Wilson, the United States and Americans in general. The leitmotif of hundreds of cartoons, caricatures and jokes was that the "American money power" had "dragged" us into the war. Simplicissimus epitomized German thoughts of the moment in a full-page drawing entitled "High Finance Crowning Wilson Autocrat of America by the Grace of Mammon." The president was depicted enthroned upon a dais resting on bulging money-bags and surmounted by a canopy fringed with gold dollars. A crown of shells and cartridges is being placed upon his head by the grinning shade of the late J. Pierpont Morgan. In the background is the filmy outline of George Washington, delivering the farewell address.

Then, of a sudden, German press policy toward the United States underwent a radical change. Silence supplanted abuse. It became so oppressive and so profound as to be eloquent. The purpose of this organized indifference soon became crystal-clear: on the one hand to bolster up German confidence in the innocuousness of American enmity, and, on the other, to slacken the United States' war preparations by committing no "overt act" of word or deed designed to stimulate them. Bernstorff had by this time reached Berlin and there is reason to suspect that his was the crafty hand directing the new policy of ostensible disinterestedness in American belligerency. The arrival of American naval forces in European waters; the inauguration of conscription; the far-reaching preparations for succoring our Allies with money, food and ships; the splendid success of the Liberty Loan; the presence of General Pershing and the headquarters staff of the United States Army in France; the enrollment of nearly ten million young men for military service; our ambitious plans for the air war; the girding up of our loins in every conceivable direction, that we may play a worthy part in the war--all these things have been either deliberately ignored in Germany, by imperious government order, or, when not altogether suppressed from public knowledge, been slurred or glossed over in a way designed to make them appear as harmless or "bluff." Finally, in an "inspired" article which offered sheer affront to the large body of truly patriotic American citizens of German extraction, the Cologne Gazette bade Germans to continue to pin their faith in "our best allies," i.e., the German-Americans, who might be relied upon (quoth the semi-official Watch on the Rhine) to "inject into American public opinion an element of restraint and circumspection which has already often been a cause of embarrassment to Herr Wilson and his English friends." "We may be sure," concluded this impudent homily, "that our compatriots are still at their post."

Events have marched fast since America "came in." In Great Britain and France men of perspicacity are not quite so jubilant over the effects of the Russian revolution as they were three months ago. They realize that the amazing cataclysm which began in Petrograd on March 13 warded off a treacherous peace between Romanoff and Hohenzollern, but also, alas! that it has effectually eliminated Russia as a fighting factor for the purposes of this year's campaign. Englishmen and Frenchmen are only now beginning to comprehend the immeasurable task that confronts New Russia in the erection of a democratic state on the ruins of autocracy while faced by the simultaneous necessity of warring against an enemy in occupation of vast Russian territory.

To-day there is little inclination in London or Paris to underestimate the providential importance of American intervention. The specter of dwindling manpower in both countries is of itself sufficient to cause them to gaze gratefully and longingly toward our untapped reservoir of human sinews. What is happening in chaotic and liberty-dazed Russia forces Englishmen and Frenchmen, however disconcerting to their pride, to acknowledge the absolute indispensability of American support. There are many among them candid enough to admit that democracy's horizon might now be perilously beclouded if the United States had refrained from playing a man's part in the battle of the nations. In Berlin, too, the true import of America's decision is dawning upon government and governed alike.

Our Allies expect us to justify our world-wide reputation for speed and organizing capacity and to transfer our activities from the forum of Demosthenes to the field of Mars. They are impressed by what we have already accomplished--I write on the day when the arrival of the first American army in France, well within three months of our entering the war, is officially announced. But amid our remote isolation from the scene of the conflict, safeguarded by geographical guarantees that its consuming fires can hardly ever sear our own soil, Englishmen and Frenchmen wonder whether we are able to estimate the magnitude of the effort required of us if we are to rise to the majestic zenith of our potentialities. Some of them, seemingly no wiser for their myopia of recent times, are frankly skeptical on that point.

It is our bounden duty, as I am sure it is our unconquerable resolve, to disillusion our Allies. To us has fallen the privilege of proving that our mighty sword has been drawn in earnest and that we shall not sheathe it until America's plighted word is gloriously made good. "Make Good!" Leaping to the tasks which await us on land and sea with that indigenous idiom on their lips, our soldiers and sailors need crave for no more inspiring slogan. Allied Europe expects us--expects us almost anxiously--to "make good."

London, June 28, 1917.

THE ASSAULT

CHAPTER I

THE CURTAIN RAISER

Countess Hannah von Bismarck missed her aim. The beribboned bottle of "German champagne" with which she meant truly well to baptize the newest Hamburg-American leviathan of sixty thousand-odd tons on the placid Saturday afternoon of June 20, 1914, went far wide of its mark. The Kaiser, impetuous and resourceful, came gallantly and instantaneously to the rescue. Grabbing the bottle while it still swung unbroken in midair by the black-white-red silken cord which suspended it from the launching pavilion, Imperial William crashed it with accuracy and propelling power a Marathon javelin-thrower might have envied squarely against the vast bow. The granddaughter of the Iron Chancellor, a bit crestfallen because she had only thrown like any woman exclaimed: "I christen thee, great ship, Bismarck!" and the milky foam of the Schaumwein trickled in rivulets down the nine- or ten-story side of the most Brobdingnagian product which ever sprang from shipwrights' hands. Then, with ten thousand awestruck others gathered there on the Elbe side, I watched the huge steel carcass, released at last from the stocks which had so long held it prisoner, glide and creak majestically down the greasy ways midst our chanting of Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles. Half a minute later the Bismarck was resting serenely, house-high, on the surface of the murky river five hundred yards away. The Kaiser and Herr Ballin shook hands feelingly, the royal monarch smiling benignly on the shipping king. The military band blared forth Heil Dir im Siegeskranz, and the last fête Hamburg was destined to know for many a troublous month had passed into history.

Countess von Bismarck had missed her aim! I wonder if there are not many, like myself, who witnessed the ill-omened launch and who endow it now with a meaning which events of the intervening year have borne out? For, surely, when the Great General Staff at Berlin reviews dispassionately the beginnings of the war, as it some day will do, there will be an absorbingly interesting explanation of how the machine which Moltke, the Organizer of Victory, handed down to an incompetent namesake and nephew missed its aim, too--the winning of the war by a series of short, sharp and staggering blows which should decide the issue in favor of the Germans before the next snow. The argument has been advanced, in vindication of Germany's innocent intentions, that the Hamburg-American line would never have launched the mighty Bismarck if the Fatherland was planning or contemplating war. But the ship was not to have made her maiden transatlantic voyage until April 1, 1915, the centenary of her great patronym's birth. The German Staff expected to dictate a glorious peace long before that time, and might have done so but for Belgium, Joffre, "that contemptible little British army," and other miscalculations. If the Staff, like Countess von Bismarck, had not missed its aim, the Bismarck would have poked her gigantic nose into New York harbor on scheduled time, a mammoth symbol of Germany, the World Power indeed, and fitting incarnation of the new Mistress of the Seas. Who knows but what perhaps grandiose visions of that sort were in the far-seeing Herr Ballin's card-index mind?

The Kaiser customarily visits the Venice of the North on his way to Kiel Week, the yachting festival invented by him to outrival England's Cowes, and the launch of the Bismarck was timed accordingly. From Hamburg the Emperor proceeds aboard the Imperial yacht Hohenzollern up the Elbe to Brunsbüttel for the annual regatta of the North German Yacht Squadron, a club consisting for the most part of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck patricians with the love of the sea inborn in their Hanseatic veins. There was no variation from the time-honored programme in 1914. William II even adhered to his unfailing practice of delivering an apotheosis of the marine profession at the regatta-dinner of the N.G.Y.S. aboard the Hamburg-American steamer on which Herr Ballin is wont to entertain for Kiel Week a party of two or three hundred German and foreign notables. There was no glimmer of coming events in the guest-list of S.S. Victoria Luise, for it included Mr. John Walter, one of the hereditary proprietors of The Times, and several other distinguished Englishmen soon to be Germany's hated foes.

By that occult agency which determines with diabolical delight the irony of fate, it was ordained that Kiel, 1914, should be the occasion of a spectacular Anglo-German love-feast, with a squadron of British super-dreadnoughts anchored in the midst of the peaceful German Armada as a sign to all the world of the non-explosive warmth of English-German "relations." That, at any rate, was the design of that unfortunately nebulous element in Berlin, headed by Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg, known as the Peace Party; for had certain highly-placed Germans acting under the Imperial Chancellor's inspiration had their way, the British Admiralty yacht Enchantress, the official craft of the First Lord of the Admiralty and actually bearing that dignitary, Mr. Winston Churchill, M.P., would have been convoyed to Kiel by Vice-Admiral Sir George Warrender's ironclads. The Kaiser's approval of the Churchill project--as I happen to know--had been sought and secured. Eminent friends of an Anglo-German rapprochement in London had done the necessary log-rolling in England. Matters were regarded in Germany so much of a fait accompli that an anchorage diagram issued by the naval authorities at Kiel only a fortnight before the "Week" indicated the precise spot at which Mr. Churchill and the Enchantress would make fast in the harbor of Kiel Bay.

Watching for the Kaiser's Armada.

But Mr. Churchill did not come. I know why. Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz, to whom the half-American enfant terrible of British politics was a pet aversion, did not want him at Kiel. Mr. Churchill's visit might have resulted in some sort of an Anglo-German naval modus vivendi, or otherwise postponed "the Day." The German War Party's plans, so soon to materialize, would have been sadly thrown out of gear by such an untimely event, and von Tirpitz is not the man to brook interference with his programmes. Had not the German Government, under the Grand-Admiral's invincible leadership, persistently rejected the hand of naval peace stretched out by the British Cabinet? Was it not Mr. Churchill's own proposals to which Berlin had repeatedly returned an imperious No? Could Germany afford to run the risk of being cajoled, amid the festive atmosphere of Kiel Week, into concessions which she had hitherto successively withheld? Von Tirpitz said No again. For years he had been saying the same thing on the subject of an armaments understanding with Britain. He said No to Prince Bülow when the fourth Chancellor suggested the advisability of moderating a German naval policy certain to lead to conflict with Great Britain. He said No to Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg when Bülow's successor timorously suggested from time to time, as he did, the foolhardiness of a programme which meant, in an historic phrase of Bülow's, "pressure and counter-pressure." Von Tirpitz had had his way with two German Chancellors, his nominal superiors, in succession. He never dreamt of allowing himself to be bowled over now by an amateur sailor from London, who, if he came to Kiel, would only come armed with a fresh bait designed to rob the Fatherland of its "future upon the water."

Until a bare two weeks before the date of the arrival of the British Squadron in German waters, nothing was publicly known either in London or Berlin of the projected trip of Mr. Churchill to Kiel. Von Tirpitz thereupon had resort to the weapon he wields almost as dexterously as the submarine--publicity--to depopularize the scheme of the misguided friends of Anglo-German peace. It was not the first time, of course, that the Grand-Admiral had deliberately crossed the avowed policy of the German Foreign Office. Von Tirpitz now caused the Churchill-Kiel enterprise to be "exposed" in the press, in the confident hope that premature announcement would effectually kill the entire plan. It did. Tirpitz diplomacy scored again, as it was wont to do. Whereof I speak in this highly pertinent connection I know, on the authority of one of von Tirpitz's most subtle and trusted henchmen. To the latter's eyes, I hope, these reminiscences may some day come. He, at least, will know that history, not fiction, is recited here.

CHAPTER II

THE FIRST ACT

"I am simply in my element here!" exclaimed the Kaiser ecstatically to Vice-Admiral Sir George Warrender, as the twain stood surveying the glittering array of steel-blue German and British men-of-war facing one another amicably on the unruffled bosom of Kiel harbor at high noon of June 25. From my perch of vantage abaft the forward thirteen-and-one-half-inch guns of His Britannic Majesty's superdreadnought battleship King George V, whither the quartette of London correspondents had been banished during William II's sojourn in the flagship, I could "see" him talking on the quarter-deck below, speaking with those nervous, jerky right-arm gestures which are as important a part of his staccato conversation as uttered words.

The Kaiser was inspecting his flagship, for when he boarded us, almost without notice, in accordance with his irrepressible love of a surprise, Sir George Warrender's flag came down and the emblem of the German Emperor's British naval rank, an Admiral of the Fleet, was hoisted atop all the British vessels in the port. For the nonce the Hohenzollern War Lord was Britannia's senior in command. Aboard the four great twenty-three-thousand-ton battleships, King George V, Audacious, Centurion and Ajax and the three fast "light cruisers" Birmingham, Southampton and Nottingham there was, for the better part of an hour, no man to say him nay. I wonder if he, or any of us at Kiel during that amazing week, let our imaginations run riot and conjure up the vision of the Birmingham in action against German warships off Heligoland within ten short weeks, or of the Audacious at the bottom of the Irish Sea, victim of a German mine, five months later?

Warrender's squadron had come to Kiel two days before. Another British squadron was at the same moment paying a similar visit of courtesy and friendship to the Russian Navy at Riga. The English said then, and insist now, that their ships were dispatched to greet the Kaiser and the Czar as sincere messengers of peace and good-will. The Germans, in the myopic view they have taken of all things since the war began, are convinced that the White Ensign which floated at Kiel six weeks before Great Britain and Germany went to war was the emblem of deceit and hypocrisy, sent there to flap in the Fatherland's guileless face while Perfidious Albion was crouching for the attack. They say that to-day, even in presence of the incongruous fact that Serajevo, which applied the match to the European powder-barrel, wrote its red name across history's page while the British squadron was still riding at anchor in Germany's war harbor.

It was exactly ten years to the week since British warships had last been to Kiel. I happened to be there on that occasion, too, when King Edward VII, convoyed by a cruiser squadron, shed the luster of his vivacious presence on the gayest "Week" Kiel ever knew. Meantime the Anglo-German political atmosphere had remained too stubbornly clouded to make an interchange of naval amenities, of all things, either logical or possible. It was the era in which Germania was preparing her grim battle-toilet for "the Day"--for all the world to see, as she, justly enough, always insisted. They were the years in which her new dreadnought fleet sprang into being. It was the period in which offer after offer from England for an "understanding" on the question of naval armaments met nothing but the cold shoulder in Tirpitz-ruled Berlin. Not until the summer of 1914 had it seemed feasible for British and German warships to mingle in friendly contact. Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg quite legitimately accounted the arrangement of the Kiel love-feast as an achievement of no mean magnitude, viewed in the light of the ten acrimonious years which preceded it. The War Party, realizing its harmlessness, and, indeed, recognizing its value for the party's stealthy purposes, blandly tolerated it. Even Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz was on hand to do the honors, and no one performs them more suavely than Germany's fork-bearded sailor-statesman.

The day after Sir George Warrender's vessels crept majestically out of the Baltic past Friedrichsort, at the mouth of Kiel harbor, to be welcomed by twenty-one German guns from shore batteries, the symptomatic event of the "Week" was enacted--the formal opening of the reconstructed Kaiser Wilhelm Canal. I place that day, June 24, not far behind the sanguinary 28th of June, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand fell, in its direct relationship to the outbreak of the war. When the giant locks of Holtenau swung free, ready henceforth for the passage of William II's greatest warships, the moment of Germany's up-to-the-minute preparedness for Armageddon was signalized.

For ten plodding years tens of thousands of hands had been at work converting the waterway which links Baltic Germany with North Sea Germany (Kiel with Wilhelmshaven) into a channel wide and deep enough for navigation by battleships of the largest bulk. After an expenditure of more than fifty million dollars the canal, dedicated with pomp and ceremony in 1892 to the peaceful requirements of European shipping, was now become a war canal, pure and simple, raised to the war dimension and destined, as the German War Party knew, to play the role for which it was rebuilt almost before its newly-banked stone sides had settled in their foundations. When I watched proud William II, standing solemn and statue-like on the bridge of his Imperial yacht Hohenzollern, as her gleaming golden bow broke through the black-white-red strand of ribbon stretched across the locks, I recall distinctly an invincible feeling that I was witness of an historic moment. Germany's army, I said to myself, had long been ready. Now her fleet was ready, too. With an inland avenue of safe retreat, invulnerably fortified at either end, Teuton sea strategists had always insisted that the Fatherland's naval position would be well-nigh impregnable. That hour had arrived. There was the Kaiser, before my very eyes, leading the way through the War Canal for his twenty-seven-thousand-five-hundred-ton battleships and battle cruisers, and even for his thirty-five-thousand-ton or fifty-thousand-ton creations of some later day, for the War Canal was made over for to-morrow, as well as for to-day. The German war machine tightened up the last bolt when William of Hohenzollern emerged from Holtenau locks into the harbor of Kiel, spectacular symbol of the fact that German ironclads of any dimensions were now able to sally back and forth from the Baltic to the North Sea and hide for a year, as the world has meantime seen, even from the Mistress of the Seas. No wonder a British bluejacket, forming the link of an endless chain of his fellows dressing ship round the rail of the Centurion in honor of the War Lord, whispered audibly to a mate, as the Hohenzollern steamed down the line to her anchorage, "Say, Bill, don't he look jest like Gawd!" Perhaps the Divinely-Anointed felt that way, too.

When the Kaiser had left the King George V after a politely cursory "inspection"--the only real "understanding" effected between England and Germany at Kiel was a tacit agreement on the part of officers and men to do no amateur spying in one another's ships--Sir George Warrender summoned us from the turret and told us some details of the All-Highest visitation. The Emperor had been "delighted to make his first call in a British dreadnought aboard so magnificent a specimen as the King George V" (she and her sisters being at the time the most powerful battleships flying the Union Jack). He wanted the Vice-Admiral to assure the British Government what pleasure it had done the German Navy "in sending these fine ships to Kiel." He hoped nothing was being left undone to "complete the English sailors' happiness" in German waters. That extorted from Sir George Warrender the exclamation that German hospitality, like all else Teutonic, was seemingly thoroughness personified, for somebody had even been thoughtful enough to lay a submarine telephone cable from the Seebade-Anstalt Hotel to the Vice-Admiral's flagship, so that Lady Maude Warrender might talk from her apartments on shore directly to her husband's quarters afloat.

"Yes," continued the Kaiser, who is a genial conversationalist and raconteur, "I am in my element in surroundings like these. I love the sea. I like to go to launchings of ships. I am passionately fond of yachting. You must sail with me to-morrow, Admiral, in my newest Meteor, the fifth of the name. I race only with German crews now. Time was when I had to have British skippers and British sailors. You see, my aim is to breed a race of German yachtsmen. As fast as I've trained a good crew in the Meteor, I let it go to the new owner of the boat. I am the loser by that system, but I have the satisfaction of knowing that I am promoting a good cause." The confab was approaching its end. "Oh, Admiral, before I forget, how is Lady ........ and the Duchess of ........? I know so many of your handsome Englishwomen."

Sir George Warrender's captains and the officers of the flagship were now grouped around him for a farewell salute to their Imperial senior officer. The Kaiser spied the King George V's chaplain, and leaning over to him inquired, gaily, "Chaplain, is there any swearing in this ship?" "Oh, never, Your Majesty, never any swearing in a British dreadnought!" The War Lord liked that, for we who had been in the Olympian heights for'd remembered his laughing aloud at this veracious tribute to Jack Tar's world-famed purity of diction.

Kiel Week thenceforward was an endless round of Anglo-German pleasantries. A Zeppelin, harbinger of coming events, hovered over the British squadron at intervals, her crew wagging cheery greetings to the ships while acquainting themselves at close range with the looks of English dreadnoughts from the sky. British sailormen paid fraternal visits to German dreadnoughts and German sailormen returned their calls. The crew of the Ajax gave a music-hall smoker in honor of the crew of the big battle-cruiser Seydlitz, the Teuton tars being no little awestruck by the complacency with which two heavyweight British boxers pummeled each other a sea-green for six rounds and then smilingly shook hands when it was all over. Germans never punch one another except in gory hate, and they seldom fight with their fists. The Kaiser was host nightly at splendid State dinners in the Hohenzollern and Vice-Admiral Warrender returned the fire with state banquets aboard the King George V. The atmosphere was fairly thick with brotherly love. It was not so much as ruffled even when the octogenarian Earl of Brassey, who wards off rheumatism by an early morning pull in his row-boat, was arrested by a German harbor-policeman as an "English spy" for approaching the forbidden waters of Kiel dockyard. German diplomacy was typically represented by Lord Brassey's zealous captor, for the master of the famous Sunbeam brought that venerable craft to Kiel to demonstrate that Englishmen of his class sincerely favored peace, and, if possible, friendship with Germany. Wilhelmstrasse tact was exemplified again when, by way of apology to Lord Brassey, the Kiel police explained that there was, of course, no intention of charging him with espionage. The policeman who arrested him merely thought he was nabbing a smuggler! At dinner that night in the Hohenzollern, the Kaiser chuckled jovially at Lord Brassey's expense. England's greatest living marine historian stole away from Kiel with the Sunbeam in the gray dawn of the next day, with new ideas of German courtesy to the stranger within the gate. He had intended to stay longer.

A naval Zeppelin cruising over the British squadron at Kiel.

Of all the billing and cooing at Kiel there is photographed most indelibly on my memory the glorious jamboree of the sailors of the British and German squadrons in the big assembly hall at the Imperial dockyard on the Saturday night of the "Week." There were free beer, free tobacco, free provender for everybody, in typical German plenty. A ship's band blared rag-time and horn-pipes all night long. Only the supply of Kiel girls fell short of the demand, but that only made merrier fun for the bluejackets, who, lacking fair partners, danced with one another, and when the hour had become really hilarious, they tripped across the floor, when they were not rolling over it, embracing in threes, bunny-hugging, grotesquely tangoing, turkey-trotting and fish-walking more joyously than men ever reveled before.

There, I thought, was Anglo-German friendship in being--not an ideal, but an actuality. I am sure the British and German tars at Kiel that boisterous Saturday night which melted into the Sunday of Serajevo little dreamt that when next they would be locked in one another's arms, it would be at grips for life or death.

CHAPTER III

THE PLOT DEVELOPS

Von G. is a Junker. He is also Germany's ablest special correspondent. A Junker, let the uninitiated understand, is a Prussian land baron, or one of his descendants, who considers dominion over the earth and all its worms his by Divine Right. If, like von G., a Junker is an army officer besides, active or ausser Dienst, and had a grandfather who belonged to Moltke's headquarters in 1870-71, he is the superlatively real thing. So, as my mission in Germany was study of the Fatherland in its characteristic ramifications, I always felt myself richly favored by the friendship and professional comradeship of von G. He was Junkerism incarnate. Several years' residence in the United States had signally failed to corrode von G.'s Junker instincts. Indeed, it intensified them, for he was ever after a confirmed believer in the ignominious failure of Democracy. It was he who popularized "Dollarica" as a German nickname for "God's country."

Von G. and I roomed together at Kiel, sharing apartments and a bath in the harbormaster's flat above the Imperial Yacht Club postoffice, whose two stories of brick and stucco serve as "annex" to the always overcrowded and palatial Krupp hotel, the Seebade-Anstalt, at the other end of the flowered club grounds. That bath, which I mention in no spirit of ablutionary arrogance, has to do with the story of von G., for it was to bring me on a day destined to be historic in violent conflict with Junkerism. Von G. and I regulated the bath situation at Kiel by leaving word on our landlady's slate the night before which of us would bathe first next morning and at what hour. The bath happened to adjoin my sleeping quarters and von G. could not reach it except by crossing my bedroom, which he always entered without knocking. On Sunday, June 28, fateful day, von G. was timed to bathe at eight A.M., I at nine--so read the schedule inscribed by our respective hands on the good Frau Hafenmcistcr's tablet. At seven-thirty I was roused from my feathered slumbers by her soft footsteps--the softest steps of German harbormasters' wives are quite audible--as she trundled across the room to arrange Herr von G.'s eight o'clock dip. Junkers are punctual people, but that morning mine was late. Eight, eight-thirty, eighty-forty-five passed, and there was no sign of him. When nine o'clock came, I thought I might reasonably conclude, in my rude, inconsiderate American way, that von G. had overslept or postponed his bath, so I made for the tub at the hour I had intended to. I was just stepping one foot into it when--it was nine-ten now--von G., rubbing his eyes, bolted in.

"What do you mean by taking my bath?" he yelled at me. "That's some of your damned American impudence!"

Whereupon, imperturbably pouring the rest of me into the bath, I ventured to suggest to Field-Marshal von G., that if he would drop the barrack-yard tone and remember that I was neither a Dachshund nor a Pomeranian recruit, I would deign to hold converse on the point under debate. I am not sure I spoke as calmly as that sounds, for to gain a conversational lap on a German you must outshout him. At any rate, von G., abandoning abuse, stalked whimperingly from the room, fired some rearguard shrapnel about "just like an American's 'nerve'," and bathed later in the day.

I did not see him again until about five o'clock that afternoon. He bolted into my room this time, too, but in excitement, not anger.

"The Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife have been assassinated," he exclaimed.

"Good God!" I rejoined, stupefied.

"It's a good thing," said von G. quietly.

For many days and nights I wondered what the Junker meant. I think I know now. He meant that the War Party (of which he was a very potent and zealous member) had at length found a pretext for forcing upon Europe the struggle for which the German War Lords regarded themselves vastly more ready than any possible combination of foes. The first year of the war has amply demonstrated the accuracy of their calculations. Germany's triumphs in the opening twelvemonth of Armageddon were the triumphs of the superlatively prepared. If Serajevo had not come along when it did--with the German military establishment just built up to a peace-footing of nearly one million officers and men and re-armed at a cost of two hundred and fifty million dollars; with von Tirpitz's Fleet at the acme of its efficiency; with the Kiel Canal reconstructed for the passage of super-dreadnought ironclads--Germany's readiness for war might have been fatally inferior to that of her enemies-to-be. The Fatherland was ready, armed to the teeth, as nation never was before. The psychological moment had dawned.

This was the reassuring state of affairs at home. What did the War Party see when it put its mailed hand to the vizor and looked abroad, across to England, west over the Rhine to France, and toward Russia? It saw Great Britain on what truly enough looked to most of the world like the brink of revolution in Ireland. It saw a France, of which a great Senator had only a few days before said that her forts were defective, her guns short of ammunition and her army lacking in even such rudimentary war sinews as sufficient boots for the troops. It saw a Russia stirred by industrial strife which seemed to need only the threat of grave foreign complications to inflame her always rebellious proletariat into revolt. Serajevo had all the earmarks of providential timeliness.

"It's a good thing," said the sententious von G.

The "trippers" from Hamburg and nearer-by points in Schleswig-Holstein, whom the Sunday of Kiel Week attracts by the thousand, were far more stunned than von G. by the news from Bosnia, which put so tragic an end to their seaside holiday. The esplanade, which had been throbbing with bustle and glittering with color, did not know at first why all the ships in the harbor, British as well as German, had suddenly lowered their pennants to half-mast, or why the Austrian royal standard had suddenly broken out, also at the mourning altitude. The Kaiser was racing in the Baltic. "Old Franz Josef," some said, "has died. He's been going for many a day." Presently the truth percolated through the awestruck crowds. The sleek white naval dispatch-boat Sleipner tore through the Bay, Baltic-bound. She carries news to William II when he governs Germany from the quarter-deck of the Hohenzollern. Sleipner dodged eel-like, through the lines of British and German men-of-war, ocean liners, pleasure-craft and racing-yachts anchored here, there and everywhere. In fifteen minutes she was alongside the Emperor's fleet schooner, Meteor V, which had broken off her race on receipt of wireless tidings of the Archducal couple's murderous fate. The Hohenzollern had already "wirelessed" for the fastest torpedo-boat in port to fetch the Kaiser and his staff off the Meteor, and the destroyer and Sleipner snorted up, foam-bespattered, almost simultaneously. The Emperor clambered into the torpedo-boat and started for the harbor.

It was the face of a William II, blanched ashen-gray, which turned from the bridge of the destroyer to acknowledge, in solemn gravity, the salutes of the officers and crew of the British flagship, as the Kaiser's craft raced past the King George V. Always stern of mien, the Emperor now looked severity personified. His staff stood apart. He seemed to wish to be alone, absolutely, with the overwhelming thoughts of the moment. Three minutes later, and he stepped aboard the Hohenzollern. Now another pennant showed at the mainmast of the Imperial yacht--the blue and yellow signal flag which means: "His Majesty is aboard, but preoccupied." I wonder if posterity will ever know what monumental reflections flitted through the Kaiser's mind in that first hour after Serajevo? Did he, like von G., think it was "a good thing," too? I suppose the first stars and stripes to be half-masted anywhere in the world that dread sundown were those which drooped from the stern of Utowana, Mr. Allison Vincent Armour's steam-yacht, anchored in the Bay off Kiel Naval Academy. A puffing little launch took me out to the Utowana as soon as I had gathered some coherent facts, which I wanted to present to Mr. Armour and his guests, American Ambassador and Mrs. James W. Gerard, of Berlin, who had motored to Kiel the day before. Mrs. Gerard's sister, Countess Sigray, is the wife of a Hungarian nobleman, and the Ambassador's wife, if my memory serves me correctly, once told me of her sister's acquaintance with both of the assassinated Royalties. We Americans discussed the immediate consequences of the day's event--how the Kaiser would take it, how it would affect poor old Emperor Francis Joseph. William II and Admiral von Tirpitz had been the Archduke's guests at Konopischt in Bohemia only a few weeks before. The Kaiser and the future ruler of Austria-Hungary had become great friends. They were not always that. There had been a good deal of the William II in Franz Ferdinand himself. People often said it was a case of Greek meet Greek, and that two such insistent personalities were inevitably bound to clash. Others said that the Archduke, inspired by his brilliantly clever consort, always insisted that German overlordship in Vienna would cease when he came to the throne. Still others knew that despite antipathies and antagonisms, the two men had at length come to be genuinely fond of each other, and that their ideas and ideals for the greater glory of Germanic Europe coincided.

These things we chatted and canvassed, irresponsibly, on Utowana's immaculate deck. All of us were persuaded of the imminency of a crisis in Austrian-Serbian relations in consequence of Princip's crime. But I am quite sure not a soul of us held himself capable of imagining that, because of that remote felony, Great Britain and Germany would be at war five weeks later. Beyond us spread the peaceful panorama of British and German war-craft, anchored side by side, and the thought would have perished at birth.

Returned to the terrace of the Seebade-Anstalt, one found the atmosphere heavily charged with suppressed excitement. Immaculately-groomed young diplomats, down from Berlin for the Sunday, were twirling their walking-sticks and yellow gloves which were not, after all, to accompany them to Grand-Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia's garden-party. That, like everything else connected with Kiel Week, had suddenly been called off.

A party of Americans flocked together at the entrance to the hotel to exchange low-spoken views on the all-pervading topic. There was big Lieutenant-Commander Walter R. Gherardi, our wide-awake Berlin Naval Attaché, resplendent in gala gold-braided uniform, and Mrs. Gherardi, who had motored me around the environs of Kiel that morning; Albert Billings Ruddock, Third Secretary of the Embassy, and his pretty and clever wife; and Lanier Winslow, Ambassador Gerard's private secretary, his effervescent good nature repressed for the first time I ever remembered observing it in that unbecoming and unnatural condition. Secretary Ruddock's father, Mr. Charles H. Ruddock, of New York, completed the group.

I met Mr. Ruddock, Sr., six months later in New York. "Do you remember what you told me that afternoon at Kiel, when we were discussing Serajevo?" he asked. I pleaded a lapse of recollection. "You said," he reminded me, "'this means war.'"

The aspect of Kiel became in the twinkling of an eye as funereal as Serajevo and Vienna themselves must have been in that blood-bespattered hour. Bands stopped playing, flags not lowered to half-mast were hauled down altogether, and beer-gardens emptied. "Hohenzollern weather," Teuton synonym for invincible sunshine, vanished in keeping with the drooping spirits of everybody and everything, and bleak thunder-showers intermingled with flashes of heat-lightning to complete the mise en scène. A week of gaiety unsurpassed evaporated into gloom and foreboding.

For myself it had been a week crowded with great recollections. Special correspondents telegraphing to influential foreign newspapers, particularly if they were English and American newspapers, were always persona gratissima with German dignitaries, even of the blood royal. The group of us on duty at what, alas! was to be the last Kiel Week, at least of the old sort, for many a year, were the recipients, as usual, of that scientific hospitality which foreign newspapermen always receive at German official hands. Before we were at Kiel twenty-four hours we were deluged with invitations to garden-parties at the Commanding Admiral's, to soirees innumerable ashore and afloat, to luncheons at the Town Hall, to the grand balls at the Naval Academy, and to functions of lesser magnitude for the bluejackets. Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz had left his card at my lodgings and so had Admiral von Rebeur-Paschwitz, the Chief of Staff of the Baltic Station, who will be pleasantly remembered by friends of Washington days when he was German Naval Attaché there. Captain Lohlein, the courteous chief of the Press Bureau of the Navy Department at Berlin, had equipped me with credentials which practically made me a freeman of Kiel harbor for the time being. In no single direction was effort lacking, on the part of the authorities who have the most practical conception of any Government in the world of the value of advertising, to enable special correspondents at Kiel to practise their profession comfortably and successfully. I must not forget to mention the visit paid me by Baron von Stumm, chief of the Anglo-American division of the German Foreign Office; for Stumm's opinion of me underwent a kaleidoscopic and mysterious change a few weeks later. Treasured conspicuously in my memories of Kiel, too, will long remain the call I received from Herr Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach's private secretary, and the message he brought me from the Master of Essen. It seems less cryptic to me now than then. I sought an interview from the Cannon Queen's consort about the visit he and his staff of experts had just paid to the great arsenals and dockyards of Great Britain.

"Herr Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach presents his compliments," said the secretary, "and asks me to say how much he regrets he can not grant an interview, as the matters which took him to England are not such as he cares to discuss in public."

I wonder how many American newspaper readers, in the hurly-burly of the fast-marching events which preceded and ushered in the war, ever knew of the little army of eminent and expert "investigators" who honored England with their company on the very threshold of hostilities? June saw the presence in London, ostensibly for "the season," of Herr Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, accompanied not only by his plutocratic wife, but by his chief technical expert, Doctor Ehrensberger of Essen, an old-time friend of American steel men like Mr. Schwab and ex-Ambassador Leishman, and by Herr von Bülow, a kinsman of the ex-Imperial Chancellor, who was the Krupp general representative in England. With a naïveté which Britons themselves now regard almost incomprehensible, the Krupp party was shown over practically all of England's greatest weapons-of-war works at Birkenhead, Barrow-in-Furness, Glasgow, Newcastle-on-Tyne and Sheffield. They saw the world-famed plants of Firth, Cammell-Laird, Vickers-Maxim, Brown, Armstrong-Whitworth and Hadfield. Not with the eyes of Cook tourists, but with the practised gaze of specialists, they were privileged to look upon sights which must have sent them away with a vivid, up-to-date and accurate impression of Britain's capabilities in the all-vital realm of production of war materials for both army and navy. It was from this personally conducted junket through the zone of British war industry that Herr Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach returned--not to Essen, but to Kiel (where he has his summer home) and to the Kaiser and von Tirpitz. It was to them his report was made. I think I understand better now why he could not see his way to letting me tell the British public what he saw and learned in England. I was guileless when I sought the interview. Let this be my apology to Herr Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach for attempting to penetrate into matters obviously not fit "to discuss in public."

During July England entertained three other important German emissaries, each a specialist, as befitted the country of his origin and the object of his mission. Doctor Dernburg came over. He spent ten strenuous days "in touch" with financial and economic circles and subjects. No man could be relied upon to bring back to Berlin a shrewder estimate of the British commercial situation. A few days later Herr Ballin, the German shipping king, crossed the channel. I recall telegraphing a Berlin newspaper notice which explained that the astute managing director of the Hamburg-American line went to England to "look into the question of fuel-oil supplies." Herr Ballin, like Doctor Dernburg, also kept "in touch" with the British circles most important and interesting to himself and the Fatherland. He must have dabbled in high politics a bit, too, for only the other day Lord Haldane revealed that he arranged for Herr Ballin to "meet a few friends" at his lordship's hospitable home at Queen Anne's Gate. Germans always felt a proprietary right to seek the hospitality of the Scotch statesman who acknowledged that his spiritual domicile was in the Fatherland.

Then, finally, came another German, far more august than Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Dernburg and Ballin--Grand-Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia. His visit fell within a week of Germany's declaration of war against France and Russia. The Prince, who enjoyed many warm friendships in England and visited the country at frequent intervals, also spent a busy week in London. He saw the King, called on with Prince Louis of Battenberg, the then First Sea Lord, and paid his respects to Mr. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. Englishmen only conjecture how he put in the rest of his time.

Perhaps an episode in the trial of Karl Lody, the German naval spy who was executed at the Tower of London on November 6, has its place in the unrecorded history of Prince Henry of Prussia's epochal visit to the British Isles. Lody confessed to his military judges at Middlesex Guildhall that he received his orders to report on British naval preparations from "a distinguished personage."

"Give us his name," commanded Lord Cheylesmore, presiding officer of the court.

"I would rather not tell it in open court," pleaded the prisoner, whom Scotland Yard, the day before, had asked me to look at, with a view to possible identification with certain Berlin affiliations.

"I will write his name on a piece of paper for the court's confidential information," Lody added. His request was granted.

When we were officially notified that the Kaiser would proceed next morning by special train to Berlin, we made our own preparations to depart. The British squadron had still a day and a half of its scheduled visit to complete, and Vice-Admiral Warrender told us he would remain accordingly. The German Admiralty had extended him the hospitality of the new War Canal for the cruise of his fleet into the North Sea, but he decided to send only the light cruisers by that route and take his battleships home, as they had come, by the roundabout route of the Baltic.

On Monday noon, June 29, I went back to Berlin, to live through five weeks of finishing touches for the grand world blood-bath.

CHAPTER IV

THE STAGE MANAGERS

Armageddon was plotted, prepared for and precipitated by the German War Party. It was not the work of the German people. What is the "War Party"? Let me begin by explaining what it is not. It is not a party in the sense of President Wilson's organization or Colonel Roosevelt's Bull Moosers. It maintains no permanent headquarters or National Committee, and holds no conventions. The only barbecue it ever organized is the one which plunged the world into gore and tears in August, 1914, though its attempts to drench Europe with blood are decade-old. You would search the German city directories in vain for the War Party's address or telephone number. No German would ever acknowledge that he belonged to Europe's largest Black Hand league. You could, indeed, hardly find anybody in Germany willing even to acknowledge that the War Party even existed. Yet, unseen and sinister, its grip was fastened so heavily upon the machinery of State that when it deemed the moment for its sanguinary purposes at length ripe, the War Party was able to tear the whole nation from its peaceful pursuits and fling it, armed to the teeth, against a Europe so flagrantly unready that more than a year of strife finds Germany not only unbeaten but at a zenith of fighting efficiency which her foes have only begun to approach.

When the German War Party pressed the button for the Great Massacre, the Fatherland had, roundly, sixty-seven million five hundred thousand inhabitants within its thriving walls. At a liberal estimate, no one can ever convince me that more than one million five hundred thousand Germans really wanted war. They were the "War Party." Sixty-six millions of the Kaiser's subjects, immersed in the most abundant prosperity any European country of modern times had been vouchsafed, longed only for the continuance of the conditions which had brought about this state of unparalleled national weal. I do not believe that William II, deep down in his heart, craved for war. I can vouch for the literal accuracy of a hitherto unrecorded piece of ante-bellum history which bears out my doubts of the Kaiser's immediate responsibility for the war, though it does not acquit him of supine acquiescence in, and to that extent abetting, the War Party's plot.

On the afternoon of Saturday, August 1, 1914, the wife of Lieutenant-General Helmuth von Moltke, then Chief of the Great German General Staff, paid a visit to a certain home in Berlin, which shall be nameless. The Frau Generalstabschef was in a state of obvious mental excitement.

"Ach, what a day I've been through, Kinder!" she began. "My husband came home just before I left. Dog-tired, he threw himself on to the couch, a total wreck, explaining to me that he had finally accomplished the three days' hardest work he had ever done in his whole life--he had helped to induce the Kaiser to sign the mobilization order!"

There is the evidence, disclosed in the homeliest, yet the most direct, fashion, of the German War Party's unescapable culpability for the supreme crime against humanity. The "sword" had, indeed, been "forced" into the Kaiser's hand. This is no brief for the Kaiser's innocence. No man did more than William II himself, during twenty-six years of explosive reign, to stimulate the military clique in the belief that when the dread hour came the Supreme War Lord would be "with my Army." Yet German officers, in those occasional moments when conviviality bred loquacity, were fond of averring, as more than one of them has averred to me, that "the Kaiser lacked the moral courage to sign a mobilization order." Die Post, a leading War Party organ, said as much during the Morocco imbroglio in 1911. Perhaps that is why General von Moltke had to force the pen, which for the nonce was mightier than the sword, into the reluctant hand of William II.

The Kaiser was constitutionally addicted to swaggering war talk, but, in my judgment, he preferred the bark to the bite. He likes his job. Like our Roosevelt, he has a "perfectly corking time" wielding the scepter. Raised in the belief that the Hohenzollerns were divinely appointed to their Royal estate, William II dearly loves his trade. He does not want to lose his throne. In peace there was little danger of its ever slipping from under him, thanks to a Socialist "movement" which was noisy but never really menacing. In war Hohenzollern rule is in perpetual peril. Hostile armies, if they ever battered their way to Potsdam, would almost surely wreck the dynasty, even if the mob had not already saved them that trouble. The Kaiser, sagacious like every man when his livelihood is at stake, always had these dread eventualities in mind. His personal interests, the fortunes of his House, all lay along the path of manifest safety--peace. Meantime his concessions to the War Party were generous and frequent. He rattled the saber on its demand. He donned his "shining armor" at Austria's side when the Germanic Powers coerced Russia into recognition of the Bosnian annexation in 1909. He sent the Panther to Agadir harbor in 1911 because the War Party howled for "deeds" in Morocco. It hoped that history in Northwestern Africa would repeat itself--that the Triple Entente would yield to German bluff as it yielded in Southeastern Europe two years previous. It did not, and it was then that the German War Party swore a solemn vow of "Never Again!" The days of the Kaiser who merely threatened war were numbered. Next time the sword would be "forced" into his hand. "Before God and history my conscience is clear. I did not will this war. One year has elapsed since I was obliged to call the German people to arms." Thus William of Hohenzollern's manifesto to his people from Main Headquarters on the first anniversary of the war, August 1, 1915. Herewith I place Frau Generalstabschef von Moltke on the stand as chief witness in the Kaiser's defense.

I have said that sixty-six million Germans wanted peace and one million five hundred thousand demanded war. But in Germany minority rules. It rules supreme when the issue is war or peace, and when the German War Party insisted upon deeds instead of speeches the nation, Kaiser and all, Reichstag and Socialist, Prince and peasant, had but one alternative--to yield. In July, 1914, the War Party imperiously asked for war, and war ensued. That is the ineffaceable long and short of Armageddon. I am persuaded that William II on July 31 was confronted with something strangely like an abrupt alternative of mobilization or abdication.

Assertions of the German people's consecration to peace may strike the reader as incongruous in face of the magnificent unanimity with which the entire Fatherland has waged and is still waging the war. But such a view leaves wholly out of account the most prodigious and amazing of all the German War Party's preparations--the skilful manipulation of public opinion for "the Day." In ten brief days--those fateful hours between July 23, when Austria launched her brutal ultimatum at Serbia, and August 1, when mobilization of the German Army and Navy made a European conflagration a certainty--Germany's vast peace majority, by deception which I shall outline in a subsequent chapter, was converted into a multitudinous mob mad for war.

I count the merely material preparations of the War Party--the steady expansion of Krupps, the development of the Fleet, the invention of the forty-two centimeter gun, the vast secret storage of arms and ammunition, the 1913 increase of the Army, the accumulation of a war-chest of gold, the stealthy organization of every conceivable instrument and resource of war down to details too minute for the ordinary mind to grasp; all these, I count as nothing compared to the hypnotization of the German national mind extending over many years.

In England and America the name of Bernhardi was on everybody's lips as the archpriest of the war. I doubt if one man in ten thousand in Germany ever heard of Bernhardi before August, 1914. He became an international personality mainly through the graces of foreign newspaper correspondents in Berlin, who, recognizing his book, Germany's Next War, as classic proclamation of the War Party's designs on the world, dignified it with commensurate attention, not because of its authorship, but because of its innate authoritativeness. The result was the translation of Germany's Next War into the English language, and subsequently, I suppose, into every other civilized language in the world. Perhaps I am myself to some extent responsible for Bernhardi's vogue in the United States. He was going to cross our country en route back to Europe from the Far East, and wrote to ask me to suggest to him the name of an American translator and publisher for his books. Bernhardi, a mere retired general of cavalry with a gift for incisive writing, woke up to find himself famous. But nothing could be more beyond the mark than to imagine that he was the pioneer of German war-aggression. He was merely its most plain-spoken prophet. The way had been blazed for decades before he appeared upon the scene. After Bernhardi had been successfully launched on the bookshelves of the world, the German War Party took him up, and it was not long before Die Post, the Deutsche Tageszeitung and other organs of blood-and-iron were able to make "the highly gratifying" announcement that Bernhardi's manual had been compressed into a fifty-pfennig popular edition, so that the German masses might be educated in the inspiring doctrine of manifest Teuton destiny, as Bernhardi so unblushingly set it forth.

The German War Party's certificate of incorporation is dated Versailles, January 18, 1871, when, on the one hundred and seventieth anniversary of the creation of the Kingdom of Prussia, Bismarck and Moltke crowned victorious William I of Prussia German Emperor. Cradled in Prussianism, the German War Party has always been Prussian, rather than German. To the credit of Bavaria, Saxony, Baden and Wurttemberg be that forever remembered. Denmark and Austria, during the seven years preceding Versailles, had had their lessons. Now France lay prostrate, despoiled of her fairest provinces and financially bled white, as the conqueror imagined. From that moment the Prussian head began swelling with invincible self-esteem, to emerge in the succeeding generation in an insensate and megalomaniac conviction that to the race which had accomplished what the Germans had achieved nothing was impossible. "World Power"--Rule or Ruin--became the national slogan.

In the reconstruction years following the 1870-71 campaign non-military Germany was bent on laying the foundations of Teuton industrial greatness. The project was vouchsafed no support from the military hotspurs who, within ten years of Sedan and Paris, did their utmost to force Bismarck into giving humbled France a fresh drubbing, that her power to rise from the dust might be crushed for all time. Then the Prussian War Party demanded that the scalp of Russia be added to its insatiable belt. Bismarck propitiated the Bernhardis of that day by thundering in the Reichstag that "We Germans fear God, and nothing else in this world!" When the Chancellor of Iron burnt that piece of bombast into the German soul in 1887, a year before William the Speechmaker was enthroned, he wrote the German War Party's "platform." Since then it has had many planks added to it, but all of them have rested squarely and firmly on the concrete upon which they were imbedded, viz., that Furor Teutonicus was a power which, when it went forth to slay and conquer, was invincible because it was filled with naught but the fear of God. Nouveau riche Germany, with France's one billion two hundred and fifty million dollars of gold indemnity in its pocket, ceased to be the Fatherland of homely virtues, celebrated in song and story, and became the plethoric Fatherland, drunk with power and wealth won by arms, the Fatherland which was to adopt the gospel of political brutality as a new national Leit-motif. "We, not the Jews, are God's chosen people. Our military prowess and our intellectual superiority make German Weltmacht manifest destiny. Full steam ahead!" Thus it was, a generation ago, that the German War Party was launched on its mad career.

During the war the English-reading world has heard much of Treitschke and Nietzsche, just as it has had its ears dinned full of Bernhardi. Germans with scars on their faces and other marks of a college education--a gentry numbering several millions--know and venerate their Treitschke and Nietzsche, and to their pernicious dogma is due in large degree the war lust of so-called cultured Germany; yet to the German masses these renowned apostles of Might is Right are little more than names. Of far more importance for the purpose of tracing the origin of the Armageddon are the living captains of the "War Party," not its deceased intellectual sponsors. Historians of the present era will gain the really illuminating perspective by relegating Nietzsche, "that half-inspired, half-crazy poet-philosopher," and Treitschke, his more modern kindred spirit, to the dead past and elevating Tirpitz and the Crown Prince, Koester of the German Navy League and Keim of the German Army League to their places. It is men like them, politicians like Heydebrand, literary firebrands like Reventlow and Frobenius, and press-pensioners like Hammann who were the real pioneers of Armageddon. These are names with which the English-reading world, enchanted by the myopic prominence given to the writings of Nietzsche, Treitschke and Bernhardi, are not familiar. But they are the real stage managers of the war tragedy, and it is with them I shall deal before narrating the culminating effects of their devilry.

Prince Bülow, fourth Imperial Chancellor and most urbane of statesmen, will live in German history as a man who resembled Bismarck in but one important particular--the gift of phrase-making. Bismarck's aphorisms are quoted by Germans with the awesome regard in which Anglo-Saxons cite Shakespeare. Bülow's name will be enshrined in Teuton memory for an epigram which had as direct a psychic influence on the German War Party's demand for the present war as any other one thing said, written or done in Germany in the last fifteen years. When he proclaimed that Germany demanded her "place in the sun," he flung into the fire fat which was to go sizzling down the age. It was worth its weight in precious gems to the blood-and-iron brigade. As Bismarck's blasphemous bluster in 1887 gave the War Party of that day its fillip, Bülow in 1907 supplied the spurred and helmeted zealots of his era with a flamboyancy no less vicious. They snatched it up with alacrity, and, being Germans, proceeded to exploit it with masterly efficiency and deadly thoroughness. A "place in the sun" forthwith inspired an entirely new German literature. It became the spiritual mother of this war.

Like all the War Party's dogma, the "place in the sun" doctrine is sheer cant. Germany has occupied an increasingly expansive "place in the sun" for forty-four years without interruption. In 1913, Doctor Karl Helfferich, a director of the Deutsche Bank, who is now Secretary of the Imperial Treasury, in a pamphlet spread broadcast throughout the world, thus summarized Germany's "place in the sun":

"The German National Income amounts today to ten thousand seven hundred fifty million dollars annually as against from five thousand seven hundred fifty to six thousand two hundred fifty million dollars in 1895. The annual increase in wealth is about two thousand five hundred million dollars, as against a sum of from one thousand one hundred twenty-five to one thousand two hundred fifty million dollars fifteen years ago.

"The wealth of the German people amounts today to more than seventy-five thousand million dollars, as against about fifty thousand million dollars toward the middle of the nineties. These solid figures summarize, expressed in money, the result of the enormous economic labor which Germany has achieved during the reign of our present Emperor."

Doctor Helfferich continued the story of the incessant widening of the Fatherland's "place in the sun." He told of the steady rise of the population at the rate of eight hundred thousand a year; of the development of German industry at so miraculous a pace that while Germany in the middle eighties was losing emigrated citizens at the rate of one hundred thirty-five thousand a year, the total had sunk in 1912 to eighteen thousand five hundred, and that Germany had become, many years before that date, an importer of men, instead of an exporter; that the net tonnage of the German mercantile fleet increased from 1,240,182 in 1888 to 3,153,724 in 1913; that German imports and exports, during the rich years immediately prior to 1910, increased from one thousand five hundred million dollars to nearly four thousand million dollars, and in 1912 exceeded five thousand millions.

By a "place in the sun" Prince Bülow meant, primarily, territorial expansion for Germany's "surplus population." Yet even in this respect German aggrandizement kept pace with her fabulous economic development. When war broke out in 1914, the German colonial empire oversea was hundreds of thousands of square miles more extensive than Germany in Europe. It is true that the Germans went in for colonial land-grabbing late in the game, after England, particularly, had acquired the best territory in both hemispheres, and many years after the Monroe Doctrine had effectually checked European expansion in the Americas. As the result of "colonial empire" in inferior regions of the earth, the total white population of German colonies in 1913 was less than twenty-eight thousand, or roundly, three and one-half per cent. of the annual growth of German population. Although acquired nominally for "trade," Germany's commerce with her colonies in imports and exports totaled in 1914 a fraction more than twenty-five million dollars, or about one-half of one per cent. of Germany's total trade of five thousand million dollars in 1912. Germany's lust for a larger "place in the sun," as it has been aptly described by the author of J'Accuse, is "square-mile greed," pure and simple, and as the same frank and brilliant writer points out, Germany not only demands a "place in the sun," but claims it for herself alone, insisting that the rest of the world shall content itself with "a place in the shade."

To popularize the "place in the sun" theory two great German national organizations went valiantly to work--the Pan-German League and the German Navy League. The Pan-Germans, whose efforts were seconded by a subsidiary society called the Association for the Perpetuation of Germanism Abroad, set themselves the task of educating German public opinion in regard to "the bitter need" of a "Greater Germany," to be achieved by hook or crook. The German Navy League dedicated itself to fomenting agitation designed to meet the Kaiser's expressed "bitter need" of vast German sea power. Ostensibly private in character, both of these militant propaganda organizations enjoyed more or less official countenance and support. On occasion, when their activities appeared too pernicious or threatened to obstruct the subtle machinations of German diplomacy, the Government would convincingly "disavow" the leagues. But all the time they were working for Germany's "place in the sun." Under their auspices, the country for years was drenched with belligerent and provocative literature, which harped ceaselessly on the theme that what Germany could not secure by diplomacy she must prepare to extort by the sword.

As the Pan-Germans and the Navy League cherished twin aspirations, it was not surprising that two men, General Keim, a retired officer of the army, and Count Ernst zu Reventlow, a retired officer of the navy, should be moving spirits in both organizations. General Keim, in his zeal to support Admiral von Tirpitz's big navy schemes, eventually went to such extremes in the pursuit of his duties as president of the Navy League that the organization's existence as a national association was momentarily threatened. It was giving the game away. Keim was thereupon removed from his position, to be succeeded by the Grand Old Man of the German Fleet, Grand-Admiral von Koester. Koester was suaviter in modo, but no less fortiter in re than Keim. Entering the presidency of the Navy League in the midst of the Dreadnought era, when Germany's dream of her "future upon the water" was sweetest, his systematic fanning of the public temper, especially against England, left nothing to be desired.

General Keim, deposed from the leadership of the Navy League, was presently kicked up-stairs by the German War Party and made president of the newly-formed "German Defense League." This association was organized to launch a national agitation in favor of increasing the German military establishment.

The methods which had caused Keim's "downfall" from the presidency of the Navy League were promptly employed by him in the new army league. With a host of influential newspapers and "war industry" interests at their back, plus the benevolent patronage of the Imperial family and Government, Koester and Keim carried out for six years preceding August, 1914, the most prodigious and audacious propaganda crusade in European history. Germany's need for "a place in the sun," on whatever particular chord they harped, was always their keynote. The "Defense League" scored its crowning triumph in 1913 by accomplishing the passage of the celebrated Army Bill whereby the land forces of the Empire were augmented at an expense of two hundred fifty million dollars--the immediate preliminary step to the assault of Europe by the Kaiser's legions.

Count Reventlow, a Jingo of Jingoes, rendered both the navy and army leagues valiant support in the columns of his newspaper, the Deutsche Tageszeitung, and in a regular grist of pamphlets and books which his facile pen from time to time reeled off. Reventlow was one of the archpriests of the War Party. A champion hater of everything foreign, he was temperamentally fitted to advocate the doctrine of Force and Germany's right to world-conquest by fire and sword. Count Reventlow, whom it was my pleasure to know intimately, hated England, France and Russia with a ferocity delightful to behold. His Francophobism was little diminished by his marriage to a charming French noblewoman. He hated America, too. I could never quite divine the gallant Count's reason for eating an American alive, in his mind, every morning for breakfast, and for despising us as cordially as he detested Mr. Winston Churchill, Monsieur Delcassé or the Czar, until he confessed to me one day that he lost a fortune through unfortunate speculation in a Florida fruit plantation. Thenceforth, apparently, Reventlow's anti-Americanism knew no bounds. It was more explosive than usual during his discussion of the Lusitania massacre, but it was pathological.

A pillar of the German War Party, whose name is almost entirely unknown abroad, is Doctor Hammann, chief of the notorious Press Bureau of the German Foreign Office and Imperial Chancellery. Hammann for twenty years, because one of the craftiest, has been one of the most powerful men in German politics. For two decades he survived the incessant vicissitudes and intrigues of the Foreign Office, which indeed were more than once of his own making. He was frequently credited with being "the real Chancellor" in Bülow's days because of his sinister influence over that suave statesman. Hammann's nominal duties were confined to manipulating the German press for the Government's purposes and to exercising such "control" over the Berlin correspondents of foreign newspapers as might from time to time appear feasible or possible. Himself a retired journalist of unsavory reputation--he was a few years ago under indictment for perjury in an unlovely domestic scandal--he seemed to his superiors an ideal personage to deal with the Fourth Estate, which Bismarck trained Germans to look upon as "the reptile press." Hammann's function, for the War Party's purposes, was to mislead public opinion, at home and abroad, as to the real intentions and machinations of Weltpolitik. Under his shrewd direction German newspapers, restlessly propagating the Fatherland's need for "a place in the sun," systematically distorted the international situation so as to represent Germany as the innocent lamb and all other nations as ravenous wolves howling for her immaculate blood. That Hammann is regarded as having rendered "our just cause" priceless service was proved only a few months ago by his promotion to a full division-directorship in the Foreign Office. He had hitherto ranked merely as a Wirklicher Geheimrat, or sub-official of the department, although as a matter of fact five Foreign Secretaries, "under" whom he nominally served, were mere putty in the hands of Germany's Imperial Press Agent-in-Chief.

Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz, of course, has for years been one of the super-pillars of the German War Party. The Kaiser's Fleet is the creation of von Tirpitz, though William II receives popular credit for the achievement, and von Tirpitz created it essentially for war. Von Tirpitz once honored me with a heart-to-heart confab on Anglo-German naval rivalry. He rebuked me in a paternal way for specializing in German naval news. Germany had no ulterior motive, he said. She was building a defensive fleet primarily, though one that would be strong enough, on occasion, to "throw into the balance of international politics a weight commensurate with Germany's status as a World Power." Von Tirpitz was the incarnation of the naval spirit which longed for the chance to show the world that Germany at sea was as "glorious" as centuries of martial history had proved her on land. German sailors chafed under the corroding restraint of peace. They hankered for laurels. They were tired of manning a dress-parade fleet, whose functions seemed to be confined to holding spectacular reviews for the Kaiser's glorification at Kiel. They hungered for "the Day." Von Tirpitz has denied passionately that they ever drank to "the Day" in their battleship messes. But it was the unspoken prayer which lulled them to well-earned sleep, for in consequence of the iron discipline and remorseless labor which von Tirpitz imposed on his officers and men in anticipation of "Germany's Trafalgar," the Kaiser's Fleet was the hardest worked navy in the world. No Armada in history was ever so perpetually "battle-ready" as the German High Seas Fleet. It was the Fleet which made its very own that other hypocritical German battle-cry, "The Freedom of the Sea," which means, of course, a German-ruled sea.

Von Tirpitz's task was not only to build the fleet but to agitate German public opinion uninterruptedly in favor of its constant expansion. To him and the Navy League, which he controlled, and to his Press Bureau and its swarm of journalistic and literary parasites, were due the remarkable Anglophobe campaigns which resulted in the desired periodical additions to the Fleet. A politician of consummate talent, von Tirpitz held successive Reichstags in the palm of his hand. No Imperial Chancellor, though nominally his chief, was ever able to override the imperious will of von Tirpitz the Eternal. Repeatedly in the years preceding the war England held out the hand of a naval entente. The War Party and von Tirpitz said "No!" And Armageddon became as inevitable as the setting sun.

I have enumerated only the outstanding figures of the German War Party. They could be supplemented at will--there are the men like Professor von Schmoller, of the University of Berlin, who foresees the day when "a nation of two hundred million Germans oversea would rise in Southern Brazil"; or Professor Adolf Lasson, also of Berlin, who proclaimed the doctrine that Germans' "cultural paramountcy over all other nations" entitles them to hegemony over the earth; or Professor Adolf Wagner, the Berlin economist, who excoriates compulsory arbitration as the refuge of the politically impotent and a dogma beneath the dignity of the Germany of the Hohenzollerns; or the whole dynasty of politician-professors like Delbrück, Zorn, Liszt, Edward and Kuno Meyer, Eucken, Haeckel, Harnack, or minor theorists like Münsterberg, who year in and year out preached the doctrine of Teutonic superiority, Teutonic invincibility and Teutonic "world destiny." These intellectual auxiliaries of the War Party in their day have sent tens of thousands of young men out of German universities with politically polluted minds. Their class-rooms have been the real breeding ground and recruiting camps of the German War Party.

And then, of course, in addition to the admirals who wanted war, and the professors who glorified war, and the editors, pamphleteers, Navy and Army League leaders and paid agitators who wrote and talked war, there was the German Army, represented by its corps of fifty thousand or sixty thousand officers, which was the living, ineradicable incarnation of war and with every breath it drew sighed impatiently for its coming. I suppose armies in all countries more or less constitute "war parties." But never in our time has an army tingled and spoiled for battle as sleeplessly as the legions of the Kaiser. It was written in the stars that it was only a question of time when they would realize their aspiration to prove that the German war machine of the day was not only the peer, but incomparably the superior, of the Juggernauts with the aid of which Frederick the Great and Moltke remapped Europe.

But the Grand Mogul of the German War Party, its pet, darling and patron saint, was Crown Prince William, the Kaiser's ebullient heir who contributed so conspicuously to Germany's loss of Paris in September, 1914. For ten years he was the apple of the army's eye. William II's oratorical peace palaverings long ago convinced his military paladins that their hopes could no longer with safety be pinned on the monarch who would do nothing but rattle his saber. "A place in the sun" could never be achieved by such tactics, they argued, so they transferred their affections and their expectations to the "young man" who cheered in the Reichstag when his father's Government was accused of cowardice in Morocco. They placed their destinies in the keeping of the Imperial hotspur who wrote in his book, Germany in Arms, that "visionary dreams of everlasting peace throughout the world are un-German." Their real allegiance was sworn henceforth to the swashbuckling young buffoon, who, taking leave of the Death's Head Hussars after two years' colonelcy, admonished them to "think of him whose most ardent desire it has always been to be allowed to share at your side the supreme moment of a soldier's happiness--when the King calls to arms and the bugle sounds the charge!" It was an open secret that when the Crown Prince was exiled to the command of a cavalry regiment in dreamy Danzig, far away from the frenzied plaudits of the multitude in Berlin, the Kaiser's action was inspired by the disquieting realisation that his heir was acquiring a popularity, both in and out of the army, which boded ill for the security of the monarch's own status with his subjects.

These, then, are the men, and these their principal methods, which provided the scenario for the impending clash. As with every great "production," preliminary plans were well and truly laid. Rehearsals, in the form of stupendous maneuvers on "a strictly warlike basis," had brought the chief actors, scene shifters and other accessories to first-night pitch. The stage managers' work was done. They had now only to take their appointed places in the flies and wings and let the tragedy proceed. The rest could be left to the puppets on both sides of the footlights. A month of slow music, and then the grand finale.

CHAPTER V

SLOW MUSIC

July in Berlin of the red summer of 1914 began as placidly as a feast day in Utopia. The electric shock of Serajevo soon spent its force. Germans seemed to be vastly more concerned over the effect of the Archduke's assassination on the health of the old Austrian Emperor than over resultant international complications. It was Sir Edward Goschen, British Ambassador in Berlin, previously accredited to the Vienna court, who recalled to me Francis Joseph's once-expressed determination to outlive his heir. The doddering octogenarian had realized his grim ambition.

The German Emperor returned to Berlin from Kiel on Monday, the 30th of June. Ties of deep affection united him to his aged Austrian ally. It was universally assumed that the Kaiser, with characteristic impetuosity, would rush to Vienna to comfort Francis Joseph and attend the Archduke's funeral. So, as events developed, he ardently desired to do; but intimations speedily arrived from the Hofburg that "Kaiser Franz" had chosen to carry his newest cross unmolested by the flummery and circumstance of State obsequies, and William II remained in Berlin for honorary funeral services in his own cathedral in memory of the august departed. Some day a historian, who will have great things to tell, may relate the real reason for the baffling of the Kaiser's desire to play the rôle of chief mourner at spectacular death-rites in the other German capital. He had telegraphed the orphans of the murdered Archduke and Duchess that his "heart was bleeding for them." Men who have an X-ray knowledge of Imperial William's psychology were unkind enough to suggest that he longed to parade himself before the mourning populace of the Austrian metropolis as Lohengrin in the hour of its woe, an Emperor on whom it were safer to lean than on the decrepit figurehead now bowed in impotent grief, with a beardless grand-nephew of an heir apparent as the sole hope of the trembling future.

Until the late Archduke Francis Ferdinand began to assert himself, William II's influence at Vienna had been profound. Francis Joseph liked and trusted him. Austria was frequently governed from Potsdam. With the great bar to his ascendency removed from the scene, the German Emperor may well have thought the hour at length arrived for the virile Hohenzollerns to save the crumbling Hapsburgs from themselves, and invertebrate Austria-Hungary from the Hapsburgs. But Vienna decided it was better the Kaiser should stay at home. His political physicians, on the evening of July 1, suddenly discovered that His Majesty was suffering from that famous German malady known as "diplomatic illness," whereupon the court M.D. dutifully announced, through the obliging official news-agency, that "owing to a slight attack of lumbago" the Kaiser would not attend the funeral of the murdered Archduke, "as had been arranged." Forty-eight hours later other "face-saving" procedure was carried out--the Viennese court proclaimed that by the express wish of the Emperor Francis Joseph, no foreign guests of any nationality were expected to attend the Royal obsequies.

On Monday, July 6, William's "lumbago" having yielded to treatment, there was sprung one of the most dramatic of all the coups which preceded the fructification of the German War Party's now fast-completing conspiracy. Although martial law was being ruthlessly enforced in Bosnia and Herzegovina and all Austria-Hungary was in a state of rising ferment over the "expiation" which public opinion insisted "the Serbian murderers" must render, the Kaiser's mind was made up for him that the international situation was sufficiently placid for him to start on his annual holiday cruise to the North Cape. Four days previous, July 2, though the world was not to know it till many weeks afterward, the military governor of German Southwest Africa unexpectedly informed a number of German officers in the colony that they might go home on special leave if they could catch the outgoing steamer. These officers reached Germany during the first week in August, to find orders awaiting them to join their regiments in the field. Notifications issued to Austrian subjects in distant countries were subsequently found also to bear date of July 2. Things were moving.

The Hohenzollern steamed away to the fjords of Norway with the Kaiser and his customary company of congenial spirits. The Government-controlled Lokal-Anzeiger and other journalistic handmaids of officialdom forthwith proclaimed that "with his old-time tact our Emperor, by pursuing the even tenor of his way, gives us and the world this gratifying and convincing sign that however menacing the storm-clouds in the Southeast may seem, lieb' Vaterland mag ruhig sein. All is well with Germany." Or words to that effect. Germany and Europe were thus effectually lulled into a false sense of security, for, as one read further in other "inspired" German newspapers, "our patriotic Emperor is not the man to withdraw his hand from the helm of State if peril were in the air." So off went the Kaiser to his beloved Bergen, Trondhjem and Tromsö to flatter the Norwegians as he had done for twenty summers previous and to shake hands with the tourists who always "booked" cabins in the Hamburg-American North Cape steamers in anticipation of the distinction the Kaiser never failed to bestow upon Herr Ballin's patrons.

The Kaiser's departure from Germany was particularly well timed to bolster up the fiction subsequently so insistently propagated, that Austria's impending coercion of Serbia was none of Germany's doing. The Hohenzollern had hardly slipped out of Baltic waters when Vienna's "diplomatic demarche" at Belgrade began. It was specifically asserted that these "representations" would be "friendly." Europe must under no circumstances, thus early in the game, be roused from its midsummer siesta. The official bulletin from the Hohenzollern read: "All's well on board. His Majesty listened to-day to a learned treatise on Slav archeology by Professor Theodor Schiemann. To-morrow the Kaiser will inspect the Fridthjof statue which he presented to the Norwegian people three years ago."

Austria-Hungary has a press bureau, too, and doubtless a Hammann of its own; now it cleared for action. While Vienna's "friendly representations" were in progress at Belgrade, the papers of Vienna and Budapest began sounding the tocsin for "vigorous" prosecution of the Dual Monarchy's case against the Serbian assassins and their accessories. The Serbian Government meantime remained imperturbable. Princip and Cabrinovitch, the takers of the Archduke and Duchess' lives, after all were Austrian-Hungarian subjects, and their crime was committed on Austrian-Hungarian soil. Serbia, said Belgrade, must be proved guilty of responsibility for Serajevo before she could be expected to accept it. Then the Berlin press bureau took the field. The Lokal-Anzeiger "admitted" that things were beginning to look as if "Germany will again have to prove her Nibelung loyalty," i.e., in support of Austria, as during the other Bosnian crisis, in 1909.

By the end of the second week of July the world's most sensitive recording instruments, the stock exchanges, commenced to vibrate with the tremors of brewing unrest. The Bourse at Vienna was disturbingly weak. Berlin responded with sympathetic slumps. To the Daily Mail in London and the New York Times I was able, on the night of July 10, to cable the significant message that the German Imperial Bank was now putting pressure on all German banks to induce them to keep ten per cent. of their deposits and assets on hand in money. On the same day an unexplained tragedy occurred in Belgrade: the Russian minister to the Serbian court, Monsieur de Hartwig, Germanism's arch-foe in the Balkans, died suddenly while taking tea with his Austrian diplomatic colleague, Baron Giesling.

Germany the while was going about its business, which at mid-July consists principally in slowing down the strenuous life and extending mere nocturnal "bummeling" in home haunts to seashore, forests and mountains for protracted sojourns of weeks and months. The "cure" resorts were crowded. In the al fresco restaurants in the cities, one could hear the Germans eating and drinking as of peaceful yore. The schools were closed and Stettiner Bahnhof, which leads to the Baltic, and Lehrter Bahnhof, the gateway to the North Sea, were choked from early morning till late at night with excited and perspiring Berliners off for their prized Sommerfrische. Herr Bankdirektor Meyer and Herr and Frau Rechtsanwalt Salzmann were a good deal more interested in the food at the Logierhaus they had selected for themselves and the kinder at Heringsdorf or Westerland-Sylt than they were in Austria's avenging diplomatic moves in Belgrade. Stock-brokers were only moderately nervous over the gyrations of the Bourse. Germans who had not yet made off for the seaside or the Tyrol felt surer than ever that war was a chimera when they read that Monsieur Humbert had just revealed to the French Senate the criminal unpreparedness of the Republic's military establishment.

Strain between Austria and Serbia was now increasing. Canadian Pacific, German stock-dabblers' favorite "flyer," tumbled on the Vienna and Berlin Bourses to the lowest level reached since 1910. Real war rumors now cropped up. Austria was reported to have "partially mobilized" two army corps. Canadian Pacifics continued to be "unloaded" by nervous Germans in quantities unprecedented. Now Serbia was "reported" to be mobilizing. It was July 17. England, we gathered in Berlin, was thinking only of Ireland. Berlin correspondents of great London dailies who were trying to impress the British public with the gravity of the European situation had their dispatches edited down to back-page dimensions--if they were printed at all. One colleague, who represented a famous English Liberal newspaper, had arranged, weeks before, to start on his holidays at the end of July. He telegraphed his editor that he thought it advisable to abandon his preparations and to remain in Berlin. "See no occasion for any alteration of your arrangements," was wired back from Fleet Street.

The German War Party, acting through Hammann, now perpetrated another grim little witticism. It was solemnly announced in the Berlin press--on July 18--that the third squadron of the German High Seas Fleet was to be "sent to an English port in August (!) to return the visit lately paid to Kiel by a British squadron." Britain's Grand Armada the while was assembled off Spithead for the mightiest naval review in history--two hundred and thirty vessels manned by seventy thousand officers and men. King George spent Sunday, July 19, quietly at sea, steaming up and down the endless lines of dreadnoughts and lesser ironclads. The Lord Mayor of London opened a new golf course at Croydon. And Ulster was smoldering.

Highly instructive now were the recriminations going on in the German, Austrian and Serbian press. Belgrade denied that reserves had been called up. The North German Gazette, the official mouthpiece of the Kaiser's Government, no longer seeking to minimize the seriousness of the Austrian-Serbian quarrel, expressed the pious hope that the "discussion" would at least be "localized." Canadian Pacifics still clattered downward. Acerbities between Vienna and Belgrade were growing more acrimonious and menacing from hour to hour. Diplomatic correspondence of historic magnitude, as the impending avalanche of White Papers, Blue Books, Yellow Books and Red Papers was soon to show, was already (July 20) in uninterrupted progress, though the quarreling Irishmen and militant suffragettes of Great Britain knew it not, any more than the summer resort merrymakers and "cure-takers" of Germany. The foreign offices, stock exchanges, embassies, legations and newspaper offices of the Continent were fairly alive to the imminence of transcendent events, but the great European public, though within ten days of Armageddon, was magnificently immersed in the ignorance which the poet has so truly called bliss.

Her "friendly representations" at Belgrade having proved abortive, Austria now prepared for more forceful measures. On July 21 Berlin learned that Count Berchtold, the Viennese foreign minister, had proceeded to Ischl to submit to the Emperor Francis Joseph the note he had drawn up for presentation to Serbia. As the world was about to learn, this was the fateful ultimatum which poured oil on the European embers and set them aglare, to splutter, burn and devastate in a long-enduring and all-engulfing conflagration. Simultaneously--though this, too, was not known till months later--the Austrian minister at Belgrade sent off a dispatch to his Government, declaring that a "reckoning" with Serbia could not be "permanently avoided," that "half measures were useless," and that the time had come to put forward "far-reaching requirements joined to effective control." That, as events were soon to develop, was an example of the diplomatic rhetoric which masters of statecraft employ for concealment of thought. It meant that nothing less than the abject surrender of Serbian sovereignty would appease Vienna's desire for vengeance for Serajevo.

During all these hours, so pregnant with the fate of Europe, the German Foreign Office was stormed by foreign newspaper correspondents in quest of light on Germany's attitude. Was she counseling moderation in Vienna, or fishing in troubled waters? Was she reminding her ally that while Serajevo was primarily an Austrian question, it was in its broad aspects essentially a European issue? Was the Kaiser really playing his vaunted rôle as the bulwark of European peace, or was Herr von Tschirschky, his Ambassador in Vienna, adjuring the Ballplatz that it was Austria's duty to "stand firm" in the presence of the crowning Slav infamy, and that William of Hohenzollern was ready once again to don "shining armor" for the defense of "Germanic honor"?

These are the questions we representatives of British and American newspapers persistently launched at the veracious Berlin Press Bureau. What did Hammann and his minions tell us? That Germany regarded the Austrian-Serbian controversy a purely private affair between those two countries; that Germany had at no stage of the imbroglio been consulted by her Austrian ally, and that the last thing in the world which occurred to the tactful Wilhelmstrasse was to proffer unasked-for counsel to Count Berchtold, Emperor Francis Joseph's Foreign Minister, at so delicate and critical a moment. Vienna would properly resent such unwarranted interference with her sovereign prerogatives as a Great Power--we were assured. Germany's attitude was that of an innocent bystander and interested witness, and nothing more. That was the version of the Fatherland's attitude sedulously peddled out for both home and foreign consumption.

Behind us lay a week of tremor and unrest unknown since the days, exactly forty-four years previous, preceding the Franco-Prussian War. The money universe, most susceptible and prescient of all worlds, rocked with nervous alarm. Its instinctive apprehension of imminent crisis was fanned into panic on the night of July 23, when word came that Austria had presented Serbia an ultimatum with a time limit of forty-eight hours. My own information of Vienna's crucial step was prompt and unequivocal. It was on its way to London and New York before seven o'clock Thursday evening, Berlin time. I was gratified to learn at the Daily Mail office in London three weeks later that I had given England her first news of the match which had at last been applied to the European powder barrel. It was five or six hours later before general announcement of the Austrian ultimatum arrived in Fleet Street.

I was not surprised to learn that my startling telegram had aroused no little skepticism. During many days preceding it was the despair of the Berlin correspondents of British newspapers that they seemed utterly unable to impress their home publics with the fast-gathering gravity of the European situation. London was no less nonchalant than Paris and St. Petersburg. England was immersed to the exclusion of everything else in the throes of the Irish-Ulster crisis. Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward Carson loomed immeasurably bigger on the horizon than all Austria and Serbia put together. In the boulevards, cafés and government-offices of Paris the salacious details of the Caillaux trial absorbed all thought. In St. Petersburg one hundred sixty thousand working men threatened an upheaval which bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the revolutionary conditions of 1905. But it was the invincible indifference of London, as it seemed in Berlin, which appealed to us most.

The newspapers of July 21, 22 and 23 came in and indicated that for England Ulster had become Europe. There was obviously little space for, and less interest in, dispatches from Berlin or Vienna describing the "undisguised concern" prevalent in those capitals. On July 21 I quoted "high diplomatic authority" for the statement that the pistol would be at Serbia's breast before the end of the week. But London remained impervious. More than one of my British colleagues, equally unsuccessful in stirring the emotions of his people, threw up his hands in resignation, muttering things about "British complacency," which would have come with poor grace from a mere American.

Since then it has occurred to me that England's sublime unconcern in the approach of Armageddon may have been more apparent than real. Sir Edward Grey's strenuous days and nights of telegraphing to his Continental ambassadors, as England's White Paper revealed, had set in as early as July 20, when he wired Sir Edward Goschen to Berlin that "I asked the German Ambassador today if he had any news of what was going on in Vienna with regard to Serbia." That was No. 1 in the series of historic dispatches comprising the official British record of the genesis of the war, which shows that there was no lack of anticipation of coming events, as far as Downing Street was concerned. So I am impelled to think that there may have been method in Fleet Street's "splashing" (Anglice for "featuring") pretty Miss Gabrielle Ray's entangled love affairs and minimizing the determination of Austria to plunge Europe into war. There is a fine spirit of solidarity in England concerning foreign affairs. British editors in particular traditionally refrain from crossing the policy of the Foreign Office, no matter what the party complexion of the minister in charge. They are accustomed to supporting it unequivocally either by omission or commission, as the interests of Great Britain from hour to hour suggest. Whenever an attitude of debonair detachment toward a given "foreign affair" is best designed to promote the country's diplomatic programme, Fleet Street can be insensibility incarnate, national esprit de corps effectually fulfilling the function of a censor. No one has ever told me that that is why the appointment of a new principal for Dulwich College received almost as much prominence on the morning of July 24 as news from Berlin, Vienna or Belgrade. My suggestion of the reason is a diffident surmise, pure and simple. It contributed materially, no doubt, toward making Germany believe that England was too "preoccupied" with Irishmen and suffragettes to think of going to war for her political honor.

But in Berlin things were now (July 24) moving toward the climax with impetuous momentum. On that day, summing up events and opinion in official and military quarters, I telegraphed the following message to London:

"'We are ready!' This was the sententious reply given today by a high official of the General Staff to an inquiry with regard to Germany's state of preparedness in the event that an Austro-Serbian conflict precipitates a European war.

"I am able to state authoritatively that the casus foederis which binds Austria, Germany and Italy in alliance would come into effect automatically the instant Austria is attacked from any quarter other than Servia.[1]

[1] The "assurances" given me by Foreign Office spokesmen, as reproduced in the foregoing telegram, were, of course, made at a moment when the German Government, no doubt quite sincerely, felt surer than it did ten days hence that the casus foederis which obligated Italy to join Germany and Austria in war would be recognized by her without quibble. Germany, as the world was so soon to find out, had convinced her own people that her war was a holy war of defense, but Italy, visiting upon her Triple Alliance partners the supreme condemnation of contemporary political history, deserted them on the palpable ground that their war was war of aggression, pure and unalloyed.

"I am further able to say that while Germany expects that war between Austria and Serbia is possible, owing to the admittedly unprecedented severity of the Austrian demands, this Government confidently hopes that hostilities will be confined to them.

"It would be going too far to say that 'war fever' prevails in Berlin to the extent it is reported to be rampant in Vienna. I find, however, even in circles to which the thought of war is ordinarily repugnant, that the imminent possibility of a European conflict is contemplated with equanimity. They say that Austria's resolute action has already cleared the atmosphere of long-prevailing 'uncertainty' which was gradually becoming insufferable. They declare in accents of relief that a situation has finally been reached where there can be no retreat. Far worse things, it is declared, are conceivable than the conflagration which Europe for years has half dreaded and half prepared for.

"Official Germany, nevertheless, does not believe that Russia will force the issue. It is argued that the matter at stake is entirely a domestic quarrel between Austria and Serbia and involves Pan-Slavism only indirectly. If Russia makes the controversy a pretext for assisting the Serbians, it is pointed out that 'the world's strongest bulwark of the monarchial principle would practically place the stamp of approval on regicide.' As suppression of regicide propaganda, root and branch, is the mainspring of the Austrian action, the German Government holds it is inconceivable that Russia could in such circumstances align herself with Serbia. If she does, and I am permitted to underline this phase of the crisis with all possible emphasis, the full strength of Germany's and Italy's armed forces are ready to be mercilessly hurled against her, and will be.

"A war against Russia would never be more popular in Germany than at the present moment. For months past the country has been educated by its most distinguished leaders to believe that an attack from Russia is imminent. During the past week Professor Hans Delbrück has been giving wide publicity to an 'open letter' received from a Russian colleague, Professor Mitrosanoff, containing the following passage:

"'It must not be forgotten that Russian public opinion plays a vastly different rôle than it did a decade ago. It has now grown into a full political force. Animosity toward Germans is in everybody's heart and mouth. Seldom was public opinion more unanimous.'

"Almost simultaneously Professor Schiemann, the Kaiser's confidential adviser on world politics, has heaped fresh fuel on the anti-Russian fire by declaring: 'We have reason to think that the underlying purpose of President Poincaré's visit to the Czar was to expand the Triple Entente into a Quadruple Alliance by the inclusion of Rumania against Germany.'

"The Bourse closed amid undisguised alarm and the wildest fears for what the week-end may bring forth. The public is inclined to remain reassured as long as the Kaiser consents to remain afloat in the Hohenzollern in the fjords of Norway, but he can reach German waters in twenty-four hours aboard the speedy dispatch-boat Sleipner, which is attached to the Imperial squadron.

"I asked a military man today what show of force Germany would make at the outbreak of hostilities involving her. He said: 'She could easily mobilize one million five hundred thousand men within forty-eight hours on each of her frontiers, east and west. That gigantic total of three million would represent only the active war establishment and reserves.'"

CHAPTER VI

THE CLIMAX

My long-standing preconceptions of Berlin as the phlegmatic capital of a phlegmatic people were obliterated for all time at eight-thirty o'clock on Saturday evening, July 25, 1914. Along with them went equally well-founded beliefs that, however incorrigible their War Party's lust for international strife, the German masses were pacific by temperament and conviction. When the news of Serbia's alleged rejection of Austria's ultimatum was hoisted in Unter den Linden, and Berlin gave way in a flash to a babel and pandemonium of sheer war fever probably never equaled in a civilized community, I knew that all my "psychology" of the Germans was as myopic as if I had learned it in Professor Münsterberg's laboratory at Harvard. Instantaneously I realized that the stage managers had done their work with deadly precision and all-devouring thoroughness. If the mere suggestion of gunpowder could distend the nostrils of the "peaceful Germans" and cause their capital to vibrate in every fiber of its being as that first real hint of war did, I was forced to conclude that the cataclysm now impending would find a Germany animated to its innermost depths by primeval fighting passions. Events have not belied the new and disquieting impressions with which Berlin's war delirium inspired me.

On the evening of July 25, after cabling to England and the United States accounts of the blackest Saturday in Berlin bourse history, I made my way to Unter den Linden in anticipation of demonstrations certain to be provoked by the result of the Austrian ultimatum, no matter whether Serbia had yielded or defied. I reached the Wilhelmstrasse corner, where the British Embassy stood, only a moment after the fateful bulletin had been put up in the Lokal-Anzeiger's windows. It read: "Serbia Rejects the Austrian Ultimatum!" That was not quite true--to put it mildly--as the world was soon to know that far from "rejecting" Count Berchtold's cavalier demands, Serbia bent the knee to every single one of them except that which called for abject surrender of her sovereign independence. But the huge crowds which had been gathered in Unter den Linden since sundown--it was now a little past eight-thirty o'clock and still quite light--knew nothing of this. All they knew and all they cared about was that "Serbien hat abgelehnt!" War, the intuition of the mob assured it, was now inevitable.

"Krieg! Krieg!" (War! War!) it thundered. "Nieder mit Serbien! Hoch, Oesterreich!" (Down with Serbia! Hurrah for Austria!) rang from thousands of frenzied throats. Processions formed. Men and youths, here and there women and girls, lined up, military fashion, four abreast. One cavalcade, the larger, headed toward Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate. Another eastward, down the Linden. A mighty song now rent the air--Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser (God Save Emperor Francis), the Austrian national anthem. Then shouts, yelled in the accents of imprecation--"Nieder mit Russland!" (Down with Russia). The bigger procession's destination was soon known. It was marching to the Austrian Embassy in the Moltke-strasse. The smaller parade was headed for the Russian Embassy in Unter den Linden. In my taxi I decided to follow on to Moltke-strasse, and, crossing to the far side of the Linden, I came up with the rearguard of the demonstrators just opposite the château-like Embassy of France in the Pariser Platz. Gathered on the portico servants were clustered watching the "manifestation." At their hapless heads the processionists were shaking their German fists as much as to say that France, too, was included in the orgy of patriotic wrath now surging up in the Teutonic soul. It was a touch of humor in an otherwise overwhelmingly grim spectacle.

Through the entrance to the leafy Tiergarten, down the pompous and sepulchral Avenue of Victory, across the Königs-Platz with its Gulliverian statue of the Iron Chancellor and the Column of Victory, through the district whose street nomenclature breathes of Germany's martial glory--Roon-strasse, Bismarck-strasse and Moltke-strasse--the parade, now swelled to many times its original proportions, halted in front of the Austrian Embassy. Some self-appointed cheer-leader called for Hochs for the ally, for another stanza of the Austrian national anthem, for more "Down with Serbia," and for more yells of defiance to Russia. Opposite the embassy-palace towered the massive block-square General Staff building. From it there emerged, while the demonstration was at its zenith, three young subalterns. The mob seized them joyously, shouldered them and acclaimed them--the brass-buttoned and epauletted embodiment of the army on whom Germany's hopes were presently to be pinned. "Krieg! Krieg!" the war mongers chanted in ecstatic shrieks. Then "Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles," twin of the Austrian anthem as far as the melody is concerned, was sung with tremendous fervor. The crowd yelled for Emperor Francis Joseph's ambassador, the Hungarian Count von Szögeny-Marich, but, if he was at home, he preferred not to face the multitude. Presently a beardless young embassy attaché appeared at an open window--the physical personification of the allied Empire--and he almost reeled from the shock of the tumultuous shout hurtled in his monocled countenance.

For nearly an hour delirium reigned unbridled. Then the demonstrators betook themselves back to the Linden district, where they met up with more processions. Throughout the night, far into Sunday morning, Berlin reverberated with their tramp and clamor. My doubts as to the capital's temper toward war were resolved, my cherished confidence in the average German's fundamental love of peace shattered. Berlin is the tuning-fork of the Empire. As she was shrieking "War! War!" so, I felt sure, Hamburg and Munich, Dresden and Stuttgart, Cologne and Breslau, Königsberg and Metz, would be shrieking before the world was many hours older. And when the Sunday papers reported that "fervent patriotic demonstrations" had broken out everywhere the night before, as soon as "Serbia's insolent action" was communicated to the public, something within me said that only a miracle could now restrain war-mad Germany from herself plunging into the fray.

I have said that Armageddon was instigated by the German War Party. In substantiation of that charge let me narrate a bit of unrecorded history. About four o'clock of the afternoon of July 25--the day of orgy in Berlin above described--the Austrian Foreign Office in Vienna issued a confidential intimation to various persons accustomed to be favored with such communications that the Serbian reply to the ultimatum had arrived and was satisfactory. It did not succumb in respect of every demand put forth by Austria, but it was sufficiently groveling to insure peace. Foreign newspaper correspondents, to several of whom the information was supplied, learned, when they applied at their own Embassies for confirmation, that the latter, too, had been formally acquainted with the fact that Serbia's concessions were far-reaching enough to guarantee a bloodless settlement of the ugly crisis.

Vienna breathed a long, sincere sigh of relief. She had feared the worst from the moment Count Berchtold dispatched the Berlin-dictated ultimatum to Belgrade; but the worst was over now. Serbian penitence had saved Austrian face.

While correspondents were busily preparing their telegrams, which were to flash all over the world the welcome tidings that war had been averted, though only by a hair's breadth, the Austrian Foreign Office was telephoning to the Foreign Office in Berlin the text of Serbia's reply.

A certain journalist was on his way to the telegraph office to "file" his "story." The editor of a great Vienna newspaper, a friend, intercepted him.

"Well, what are you saying?" the editor inquired. "That it's peace, after all," replied the correspondent.

"It was peace," said the editor sadly, "but meantime Berlin has spoken."

* * * * *

The week of fate opened on Monday, July 27, amid general expectations that the worst had become inevitable. Popular alarm was not assuaged by the impulsive action of the Kaiser, contrary to the preferences of the Government, in breaking off his Norwegian cruise when Serbia's defiance was wirelessed to the Hohenzollern and rushing back to Kiel under full steam. "The Foreign Office regrets this step," reported Sir Horace Rumbold, acting British Ambassador at Berlin, to Sir Edwin Grey. "It was taken on His Majesty's own initiative and the Foreign Office fears that the Emperor's sudden return may cause speculation and excitement." It was, of course, characteristic of the monarch whom Paul Singer, the late Socialist chieftain, once described to me as "William the Sudden." "Speculation and excitement" are precisely what the Kaiser's dramatic return did precipitate. He did not come into Berlin, but retired to the comparative privacy of the New Palace in Potsdam, to engage forthwith in protracted council with his political, diplomatic, military and naval advisers. Meantime Berlin throbbed with forebodings and unrest. The Stock Exchange almost collapsed. Values tumbled by the millions of marks. Fortunes vanished between breakfast and lunch. Financiers suicided. Savings banks were besieged by battalions of nervous depositors. Gold began to disappear from circulation.

At the Foreign Office, newspaper correspondents were informed that the situation was undoubtedly aggravated, but not "hopeless." Germany's aim was to "localize" the Austrian-Serbian war, which was now an actuality. "All depends on Russia," Herr Hammann's automatons assured us when we asked who held the key to the situation. Germany remained, as she had been from the beginning of the crisis, merely "an interested bystander." Austria had not sought her counsel, and "none had been offered." It would have been an insufferable offense (said the Hammannites) for Berlin to intrude upon Vienna with "advice" at such an hour. Austria was a great sovereign Power, Count Berchtold a diplomat of sagacity and courage, and Germany's rôle was obviously that of a silent friend. She had very particularly "not been concerned" with the admittedly stiff terms the rejection of which had now, unhappily, resulted in war. All this we were told at Wilhelmstrasse 76 in accents of touching sincerity.

The attitude of the German public was now one of amazing resignation to the possibility of war. Men of affairs, who had during the preceding forty-eight hours in many cases seen great fortunes irresistibly slipping from their grasp, contemplated a European conflagration with incredible equanimity. I recall with especial distinctness the views expressed by my old friend, Geheimrat L., the head of an important provincial bank. "We have not sought war," he said, "but we are ready for it--far readier than any of our possible antagonists. Our preparedness, military, naval, financial and economic, is in the most complete state it has ever attained. Confidence in the army and navy is unbounded, and it is justified. For years the political atmosphere has been growing more and more uncomfortable for Germany (Geheimrat L. evidently longed for "a place in the sun," too), and we have felt that war was inevitable, sooner or later. It is better that it comes now, when our strength is at the zenith, than later when our enemies have had time to discount our superiority." Geheimrat L. and I were standing in Unter den Linden while he talked. Another procession of war-zealots tramped by, singing Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles. "You see," he said, pointing to the demonstrators and waving his own hat as the crowd shrieked "Hoch der Kaiser!", "we all feel the same way." Germany, in other words, while not exactly spoiling for war, was something more than ready for it and would leap into the ring, stripped for the combat, almost before the gong had called time. Events did not belie that fantasy, either.

Sir Edward Grey was now making eleventh-hour efforts to stave off fate. He was constrained to have Vienna view the Serbian imbroglio from the broad standpoint of a European question, which the Germanic Powers, of course, knew that it was. He proposed a conference in London between himself and the ambassadors of Germany, Russia, France and Italy, in the hope of settling the Austrian-Serbian dispute on the basis of Serbia's reply to Count Berchtold's ultimatum. "It has become only too apparent," the British Foreign Secretary wrote a year later in a crushing rejoinder to the German Chancellor's revamped and distorted version of the war's beginnings, "that in the proposal we made, which Russia, France and Italy agreed to, and which Germany vetoed, lay the only hope of peace. And it was such a good hope! Serbia had accepted nearly all of the Austrian ultimatum, severe and violent as it was." Herr Hammann's minions told us with pleasing plausibility of the reasons why Germany declined the conference proposal. "We can not recommend Austria," they said, "to submit questions affecting her national honor to a tribunal of outsiders. It would not be consistent with our obligations as an ally." That was subterfuge unalloyed, as was amply proved by Germany's subsequent refusal even to suggest any other method of mediation, in which Sir Edward Grey had promised acquiescence in advance. The War Party's plans were plainly too far progressed to tolerate so tame and inglorious a retreat. It was thirsting for blood, and was in no humor to content itself with milk and water. It was like asking a champion runner, trained to the second and poised on the starting tape in an attitude of trembling expectation of the "Go" pistol, to rise, return to the dressing-room, get into street clothes and cool his ardor for victory and laurels by taking a leisurely walk around the block. The Tirpitzes, the Falkehhayns, the Reventlows, the Bernhardis and the Crown Princes, lurking Mephistopheles-like in the background, leaned over Bethmann Hollweg and the Kaiser on July 28, while Sir Edward Grey's proposal was undergoing final consideration, and whispered in their ear an imperious "No!" Germany, as "evidence of good faith," the Wilhelmstrasse told us next day, was continuing to exercise friendly pressure "in the direction of peace" at both St. Petersburg and Vienna. But, as the Colonel said of Mr. Taft, Berlin meant well feebly. The mills of the war gods were grinding remorselessly, and they were not to be clogged.

Early in the evening of Wednesday, July 29, the Kaiser summoned a council of war at Potsdam. The council lasted far into the night. Dawn of Thursday was approaching before it ended. All the great paladins of State, civilian, military and naval, were present. Prince Henry of Prussia, freshly arrived from London, brought the latest tidings of sentiment prevailing in England. The Imperial Chancellor and Foreign Secretary von Jagow were armed with up-to-the-minute news of the diplomatic situation in Paris and St. Petersburg. Russia's plans and movements were the all-dominating issue. General von Falkenhayn, Minister of War, was prepared with confidential information that, despite the Czar's ostensible desire for peace and his still pending communication with the Kaiser to that end, "military measures and dispositions" of unmistakably menacing character were in progress on both the German and Austrian frontiers. Lieutenant-General von Moltke, Chief of the General Staff, was supplied not only with corroborative information of the imminency of "danger" from Russia, but with reassuring details of Germany's power to meet and check it. Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz, Secretary of the Navy, and Admiral von Pohl, Chief of the Admiralty Staff, were ready to convince the Supreme War Lord that the fleet was no less prepared than the army for any and all emergencies. There was absolutely nothing, from a military and naval standpoint, so the generals and admirals were eager to demonstrate, to justify Germany in assuming and maintaining anything but "a strong position."

Some day, perhaps, the history of that fateful night at Potsdam will be written, for there was Armageddon born. Its full details have never leaked out. So much I believe can be here set down with certainty--it was not quite a harmonious council which finally plumped for war. At the outset, at any rate, it was divided into camps which found themselves in diametrical opposition. The "peace party," or what was left of it, is said, loath as the world is to believe it, to have been headed by the Kaiser himself. Bethmann Hollweg supported his Imperial Master's view that war should only be resorted to as a last desperate emergency. Von Jagow, the innocuous Foreign Secretary, dancing as usual to his superiors' whistle, "sided" with the Emperor and the Chancellor. Von Falkenhayn and von Tirpitz demanded war. Germany was ready; her adversaries were not; the issue was plain. Von Moltke was non-committal. He is a Christian Scientist, and otherwise pacific by temperament. Prince Henry of Prussia did not at least violently insist upon peace. I could never verify whether the German Crown Prince was permitted to participate in the war council or not. If he was, posterity may be sure that his influence was not exercised unduly in the direction of a bloodless solution of the crisis. Herr Kühn, the Secretary of the Treasury, submitted satisfying figures to prove that, if war must be, Germany was financially caparisoned. From Herr Ballin came word that if war should unhappily be forced upon the Fatherland by the bear, the present positions of German liners were such that few, if any, of them would fall certain prey to enemy cruisers. Those which could not reach home ports would be able to take refuge in snug neutral harbors.

The next day, Thursday, July 30, I was able to telegraph my chiefs in London and New York that the fat was now almost irrevocably in the fire. The War Party's views had prevailed. The fiction that "Russian mobilization" was an intolerable peril which Germany could no longer face in inactivity had been so assiduously maintained that any reluctance to go to war, which may have lingered in the Kaiser's soul, was now overcome. The sword had literally been "forced" into his hand. Russia, it was decided, was to be notified that demobilization or German "counter-mobilization" within twenty-four hours was the choice she had to make. My information went considerably beyond this so-called "last German effort on behalf of peace." It was to the effect that while Germany had taken "one more final step" in the direction of an amicable solution of the crisis, she did not really expect it to be successful, and had, indeed, resorted to it merely in order to be able to say that she had "left no stone unturned to prevent war."

Germany was now in everything except a formally proclaimed state of war. Mobilization was not actually "ordered," but all the multitudinous preliminaries for it were well under way. As later developed, German reservists from far-off Southwest Africa were at that very moment en route to Europe on suddenly granted "leaves of absence." The terrible button at whose signal the German war machine would move was all but pressed. To prove it the super-patriotic, Government-controlled Lokal-Anzeiger let a woefully tell-tale cat out of the bag. It issued a lurid "Extra" at two-thirty P.M., categorically announcing that "the entire German army and navy had been ordered to mobilize." After the news had spread through Berlin like wildfire and sent prices on the Bourse tobogganing toward the bottom at the dizziest pace of all the week, the Lokal-Anzeiger twenty minutes later blandly issued another "Extra," explaining that through "a gross misdemeanor in its circulating department" the public had been furnished with "inaccurate news" about mobilization!

The good "Lokal's" news was not "inaccurate." It was only premature, for twenty-four hours later, on Friday, July 31, it was permitted, along with other papers, to flood the metropolis with another "Extra," officially proclaiming that Emperor William had declared Germany to be in a "state of war." The "Extras" added that the Kaiser would himself shortly arrive in Berlin from Potsdam. No one doubted now that the Fatherland was on the brink of grim and portentous events. War might only be a matter of hours, perhaps minutes. Instantaneously all roads led to Unter den Linden. Through it, now Oberster Kriegsherr indeed--Supreme War Lord is not an ironical sobriquet foisted upon the German Emperor by detractors, as many people think, but an actual, formal title--the Kaiser would soon be passing. History was to be made to repeat itself. Old King William I, returning to Berlin from Ems on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War made a spectacular entrance into Berlin under identical circumstances. The welcome to his grandson must be no less imposing and immortal.

I was fortunate enough to secure a reserved seat in the grandstand--a table on the balcony of the Café Kranzler at the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and the Linden. The boulevard was jammed. All Berlin seemed gathered in it. Presently the triple-toned motor horn of the Imperial automobile tooted from afar the signal that the Kaiser was approaching. A tornado of cheers and Hochs greeted him all along the Via Triumphalis. The Empress, at his side, smiled in token of the most spontaneous welcome the Kaiser ever received at the hands of his never overfond Berliners. The brass-helmeted War Lord himself was the personification of gravity. His favorite pose in public is uncompromising sternness; to-day it was the last word in severity. He did not seem a happy man, nor even so haughty as I always imagined he would be in the midst of war delirium. It was an unmistakably anxious Kaiser who entered his capital on that afternoon of deathless memory.

The Imperial show, smacking strongly of William's own stage management, had only begun, for now the Crown Prince's familiar motor signal, Ta-tee, Ta-ta, sounded from the direction of Brandenburg Gate, and presently he came along, with the beauteous and all-captivating Crown Princess Cecelie at his side. Squatting between them, saluting solemnly in sailor-suit, was their eldest son, the eight-year-old Kaiser-to-be. The ebullition of the crowd in Unter den Linden knew no bounds at the sight of the Crown Prince, for years Berlin's darling. In striking contrast to the Kaiser's solemnity was his heir's smile-wreathed face, which, in the picturesque German idiom, was literally freudestrahlend (radiant of joy). The specter of war was obviously not depressing the Colonel of the Death's Head Hussars. He beamed and grinned in boyish happiness as the mob surged round his car so insistently that for a minute it could not proceed. Right and left he stretched out his arm to shake hands with the frenzied demonstrators nearest him. The Crown Princess shared her consort's manifest pleasure, while the princeling saluted tirelessly. Then other cars whirled by, containing Prince and Princess August Wilhelm of Prussia and the remaining Princes, the sailor Adalbert, and Eitel Friedrich, Joachim and Oscar. The Hohenzollern soldier-family picture was to be complete at this immortal hour. Now there was a fresh outburst of acclamation almost as volcanic as that which greeted the Crown Prince. Admiral Prince Henry, in navy blue and steering his own automobile, was passing. The Kaiser's brother is very dear to the popular heart in Germany. As the Crown Prince typifies the army, so Prince Henry stands for the navy. The procession was brought up by the funereal Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg. For him the cheering was only desultory, as he is not a familiar figure, and many of the crowd obviously had no notion who the worried-looking old gentleman in silk hat and frock coat might be.

Soldiers in the making--aiming practice

The throngs now streamed toward the Royal Castle in the confident hope that William the Speechmaker would not disappoint them. About six o'clock in the evening their patience and Hochs were rewarded. Surrounded by the members of his family, the Kaiser appeared at the balcony window facing the Cathedral across the Lustgarten (this was more of the 1870 precedent) and, looking down upon the densest and most fervent crowd of his subjects he ever faced, addressed to them in the guttural, jerky, but wonderfully far-reaching tones which are his oratorical style, the following homily:

"A fateful hour has fallen upon Germany. Envious people on all sides are compelling us to resort to just defense. The sword is being forced into our hand. If at the last hour my efforts do not succeed in maintaining peace, I hope that with God's help we shall so wield the sword that we shall be able to sheathe it with honor.

"War would demand of us enormous sacrifices in blood and treasure, but we shall show our foes what it means to provoke Germany, and now I commend you all to God. Go to church, kneel before God, and pray to Him to help our gallant army."

Berlin went to bed on the night of July 31 hoarse with Hoching and footsore from standing and marching, but now indubitably certain that events were impending which would try the Fatherland's soul as it had never been tried before.

CHAPTER VII

WAR

"The Russian mobilization menace!" That was the great myth now irrevocably fastened on the German mind. "The Cossacks at our gate!" Thus was the Fatherland gulled by its war zealots into the belief that the tide of blood sweeping down from the East could no longer be stemmed. German war history was repeating itself. As 1870 was born in deceit, so was 1914. Bismarck doctored the Ems telegram forty-four years previous to extenuate the assault on France, and now the "Russian mobilization menace," the Cossack bogy, was invented as justification for precipitating and popularizing the conflict on which the Prussian War Party's heart was set. A "state of war" had been decreed by the Kaiser in accordance with the paragraph of the Imperial Constitution which authorizes him to declare martial law whenever the domains of the Empire or any part of them are in jeopardy. The Czar's hordes were gathered on the Eastern frontier, preparing to launch a murderous, burglarious attack on innocent, defenseless, peace-loving Germany. They had done more than that--and here was another Hohenzollern 1870 analogy; the Emperor of all the Russias had "insulted" the Kaiser by feloniously massing his legions on the German border while William II, at Nicholas' own request, was "working for peace." It was a pretty story, and German public opinion, shrewdly prepared, swallowed it whole. Germans, their Emperor's "honor" and their own safety now at stake, approved fervidly the ultimatum which they were told had been presented at St. Petersburg, demanding abandonment of the Czar's "provocative" military measures.

I have too much respect for the perfected might of the Teutonic war-machine to believe that any German soldier worthy of the name ever considered Russian military movements along the Prussian and Austrian frontiers at the end of July, 1914, a "menace." It was only a fortnight previous that the German Military Gazette, the official army organ, had laughed the whole Russian army out of court as an organization hardly worthy of Prussian steel. Now the transfer of half a dozen Russian corps had become so vast a peril as to necessitate plunging the whole German Empire into a "state of war!" Everybody who had eyes to see and ears to hear in Germany, native and foreigner alike, always knew that actual mobilization in that country was the merest formality. The Germans were always ready for war. It was their commonest boast. A high officer of the General Staff, twenty-four hours after Serbia's rejection of the Austrian ultimatum, when asked how ready Germany was for eventualities, said, sententiously, "All ready." My Junker friend, Von G., of Kiel, himself a Prussian officer, would have snorted with scornful glee if I had ever suggested to him that any Russian military measures could really "menace" Germany. He knew what I knew, and what anybody with sense in Germany always understood, that, compared to what the Fatherland with its comprehensive system of military-controlled state railways could achieve in the way of final "mobilization," Russia would require weeks where Germany would need only days, or even hours. Germany would be like Texas, criss-crossed in every direction with faultless means of communication and crammed with troops and munitions, mobilizing against the rest of the United States, with the latter having to concentrate armies on the Rio Grande from Florida, Maine, Oregon and Lower California, and a shoe-string railway system with which to do it. The "Russian mobilization menace" was Germany's supreme bluff.

St. Petersburg had been given until twelve o'clock noon of Saturday, August 1, to "demobilize." Failing to do so, Germany would be "compelled to resort to a counter-mobilization." France had been called upon to indicate what her attitude would be in case of a Russo-German conflict, but the ultimatum to Paris, we understood, had no time limit attached. All knew that the great decision rested essentially in Russia's hands; that war with the Czar meant war with the French, too. Twelve o'clock Berlin time came and went without word of any kind from Count Pourtales, the Kaiser's ambassador in St. Petersburg. The Emperor and his civil, military and naval advisers were closeted in a Crown council at the Castle. Pourtales' message, if there was one, the Foreign Office told us, would doubtless reach the Kaiser in the midst of the council, which was a continuous one. Berlin waited in excruciating impatience. The Bourse writhed in panic. Bankers met to consider closing it altogether, but decided that the worst might be avoided by limiting transactions to spot-cash deals. The air was electric with rumor. Russia had asked for a further period of grace, one heard. Hope, report said, while slender, was not yet utterly vanished.

The afternoon passed in almost insufferable anxiety. Unter den Linden and the Lustgarten, the sprawling area around the Castle, were choked with people tense with expectancy. Dread, rather than war fervor, inspired them. About five-twenty o'clock, after one of the daily heart-to-heart war talks I had been privileged to hold over the teacups with Mrs. Gerard, I drove through the Wilhelmstrasse toward the Linden, accompanied by my English colleague, Charles Tower, Berlin representative of the New York World and London Daily News. I do not suppose the historic little spectacle was specially arranged in our honor, but as a matter of fact we happened to pass the Foreign Office at the very instant that Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg, grave with inconcealable worry, was entering a plebeian taxicab. He was evidently starting out on a transcendent mission, for he held in his hand a document of such absorbing interest that he hardly raised his eyes from it as he clambered into the cab. Accompanying him were Foreign Secretary von Jagow and a military aide-de-camp. I blush to confess that Tower and I were filled with such overweening curiosity to find out what that ominous parchment contained, and where the Chancellor was taking it, that we ordered our chauffeur to follow at not too respectful a distance. I never saw a Berlin taxi tear through the heart of the down-town district so madly as Bethmann Hollweg scorched down the Behren-strasse, past the banks which line Germany's Wall Street and the back of the Opera, into Französische-strasse, over the little bridge which spans the canal, and into the southern esplanade of the castle. Only small crowds were gathered at this point, and the Chancellor's cab swung past the sentries and through the big Neptune Gate of the Schloss almost unnoticed. Now instinctively certain of the nature of Bethmann Hollweg's errand, Tower and I made our way to the Lustgarten, since early morning an endless vista of faces stretching nearly all the way from the Dom to the Brandenburg Gate end of Unter den Linden, a mile to the west. We felt sure that the universally awaited Order of Mobilization might be momentarily expected. As events developed, that was the document which we had seen the Chancellor taking to the Kaiser. It was six o'clock. The doleful chimes of the Cathedral across from the Castle were summoning the people to the service of intercession ordained by the Emperor earlier in the day. Solemnity hung over the multitude like a pall. Men and women knew now that Russia's answer, or lack of answer, whichever it might be, meant war, not peace. They had not long to wait for confirmatory news. As soon as word was telephoned to the Wolff Agency, the official news bureau, that the Imperial signature had at length been officially given--that the sword was now, literally and beyond recall, "forced" into William II's hands--the newspapers, which had had sufficient advance information for their purposes, drenched the capital with Extrablätter containing the fateful tidings:

+----------------------------------+
| |
| "UNIVERSAL MOBILIZATION OF THE |
| GERMAN ARMY AND NAVY!" |
| |
+----------------------------------+

Another two lines explained, breathlessly, that an order to that effect had just been promulgated by the Supreme War Lord. The twelve-hour period which Germany had granted to Russia for "the making of a loyal declaration" had been ignored. To-morrow, added the chief announcement in the most portentous Extrablatt a German newspaper ever issued, would be the first mobilization day. All Sunday, Monday and Tuesday the Furor Teutonicus would be busy donning shining armor. The deed was done. "Gentlemen," the Kaiser is said to have remarked to Moltke, Falkenhayn and the rest of the military clique, after affixing his signature to the document which meant not only mobilization, but war, "you will live to regret this."

In the midst of our exclusively German environment in those immortal hours--we could now neither telegraph nor telephone in anything except German, nor even read in anything except that language, for foreign newspapers were no longer arriving--I must confess I was filled with no little prepossession in Germany's favor. The Kaiser's case seemed not only good. On the biased evidence available--we had, of course, no other--it even seemed strong. Such fragmentary dispatches from abroad as the Military Censor, already enthroned, permitted to be printed were naturally only those which resolutely bolstered up the fiction of "our just cause." Of the stealthy plot to violate Belgium we had no glimmer of an inkling. We knew only of the "Russian mobilization menace," of the Kaiser's wrecked efforts in the direction of "peace," and of the reluctance with which impeccable Germany was stripping for the fray in defense of her honor, rights and imperiled territorial integrity. Convinced as I had long been of the War Party's lust for "the Day," a setting appeared to have been contrived which put Germany in a plausible, if not altogether blameless, light. It was mass-suggestion, as a Berlin psychologist would describe it, all-hypnotizing in its effects. It was not until five days afterward, when I had crossed the German frontier, reached Dutch territory and come up with the truth that the curtain was lifted and I could look out upon what seemed, after ten days of "inspired" information in Berlin, like country which my eyes had never seen before....

In front of the Royal Castle, Berlin, waiting for announcement of mobilization, August 1st, 1914.

The Mobilization Order tore through the capital with the velocity and the shock of a shell. Expected, it yet stunned. The throng before the Castle still sang Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles and cheered for the Kaiser, and desultory processions of young men and boys still marched hither and thither across the town. But an atmosphere of soberness and grim reality now descended upon Berlin. The street-corner pillars which serve as bill-boards in Germany were already splashed red with the official decree, gazetting August 2, 3 and 4 as the days when the Kaiser's subjects, liable for military service with the first line (Reserve), must report at long-appointed assembly depots, don long-ready uniforms, and march each to his long-designated place in the long-prepared war. Almost simultaneously the telegraph, now like the railway and postal services automatically passed into military control, brought every reservist in the realm definite information as to where and when he was expected to present himself. The magic system which Roon devised for hurling Germany's legions across the Rhine in '70 was once again in mechanical, yet noiseless, motion. Sheer jubilation, the grand-stand patriotism with which Berlin had reverberated for a week, died out. There were good-bys to be said now, long good-bys, and affairs to be wound up. The iron business of war was waiting to be attended to. The crowds in Unter den Linden and the Lustgarten melted homeward, silently, immersed in anxious reflection. Before they waked from their next sleep, the first shot might be fired. On what new paths had the Fatherland entered? Would they lead to death or glory? Never before, I imagine, was the modern German, in his inimitable idiom, given so furiously to think.

The war began early Sunday morning, August 2. Before nine o'clock "Extras" were in the streets with the following official news, the very first bulletin of the war:

"Up to 4 o'clock this morning the Great General Staff has received the following reports:

"1. During the night Russian patrols made an attack on the railway bridge over the Warthe near Eichenried (East Prussia). The attack was repulsed. On the German side, two slightly wounded. Russian losses unknown. An attempted attack by the Russians on the railway station at Miloslaw was frustrated.

"2. The station master at Johannisburg and the forestry authorities at Bialla report that during last night (1st to 2nd) Russian columns in considerable strength, with guns, crossed the frontier near Schwidden (southeast of Bialla) and that two squadrons of Cossacks are riding in the direction of Johannisburg. The telephone communication between Lyck and Bialla is broken down.

"According to the above, Russia has attacked German Imperial territory and begun the war."

The "Russian mobilization menace" was now an accomplished fact, and the Cossack bogy, too, converted into an officially hall-marked actuality!

Modern war, from the newspaperman's standpoint, consists principally of two things--censorship and rumors. Both had now set in with a vengeance. The first day in Berlin swarmed with irresponsible report. People believed anything. Official news was scarce and "far between." The second General Staff bulletin to be issued was a laconic announcement that troops of the VIII (Rhenish) army corps had occupied Luxemburg "for the protection of German railways in the Grand Duchy." Eydtkuhnen, the famous German frontier station opposite the Russian border town of Wirballen, was now reported occupied by Russian cavalry detachments. A Russian had been caught in the act of trying to blow up the Thorn railway bridge. Now France--like Russia, "without declaration of war"--had violated the sacredness of German territory. French aviators had flown into Bavaria and dropped bombs in the neighborhood of Nuremberg, evidently with the intent of destroying military railway lines. Canard succeeded canard. The famed "German war on two fronts" was no longer a figment of the imagination. It had become immutable fact. Monsieur Sverbieff, the Czar's ambassador, we heard, had already received his passports. He would leave Berlin in the evening in a special train to the Russian frontier. When would Monsieur Cambon, the French ambassador, the Republic's accomplished representative in Washington during our war with Spain, be given his walking-papers? So far rowdies had yelled Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles only in front of the Russian Embassy. Now that French airmen had shelled Bavaria, how long would it be before the chateau in Pariser Platz would be stormed?

The British Embassy was wrapped in Sabbath calm. Was not Berlin reading with intensest gratification the Wolff Agency's carefully selected London dispatches saying that "powerful influences are at work to prevent England becoming involved in the war"? Mr. Norman Angell had written in that sense to The Times--the Lokal-Anzeiger reported with undisguised satisfaction. A large number of British professors, it added, had launched a "protest" against war with Germany, "the leader in art and science and against whom a war for Russia and Serbia would be a crime against civilization." A "great and influential meeting of Liberals in the Reform Club" had adopted resolutions commending Sir Edward Grey's efforts on behalf of peace and "energetically demanding the strict preservation of English neutrality." The Germans took heart. Blandly ignorant of their Government's secret diplomatic schemings, now in frantic progress, to keep Great Britain out of the fray, they were lulled by their rulers and doctored press reports into thinking that the danger of interference from the other side of the North Sea was as good as non-existent. The German Imperial Government practised this deception on their own people till the last possible moment. German newspaper readers, in those fitful hours, were being led to believe that the voice of Britain was the pacifist, pro-German voice of Radicalism as represented by journals like The Daily News, Westminster Gazette and The Nation. No intimation was permitted to reach the German public that voices like The Times, The Observer, The Daily Mail, The Morning Post and Daily Telegraph were calling for the only action by the Government consonant with British honor and British rights. The outburst of fanatical rage against the "perfidious sister nation" so soon to ensue was mainly due, I shall always remain convinced, to the diabolical swindle of which the German nation was the victim at the hands of its dark-lantern diplomatists. In that far-off day when the scales have fallen from Teutonic eyes, I predict that the Germans will call for vengeance on their deceivers. As they were duped about Russia, so were they deliberately misled about England.

Before the war was half a day old the spy mania, which was destined to be one of the most amazing symptoms of the war's early hours, was raging madly from one end of the country to the other. It was directly inspired and encouraged by the Government. The authorities caused it to be known that "according to reliable news" Russian officers and secret agents infested the Fatherland "in great numbers." "The security of the German Empire," the people were informed, "demands absolutely that in addition to the regular official organs, the entire population should give vent to its patriotic sentiments by co-operating in the apprehension of such dangerous persons." "By active and restless vigilance," continued this official incitement to lynch law, "everybody can in his own way contribute toward a successful result of the war." It was not to be expected that a nation so idolatrous of officialdom as the Germans could possibly resist this carte-blanche permit to every man to play the rôle of an avenging sleuth. The inevitable result was that Germany became in a flash the scene of a nation-wide "drive" for spies, real or imaginary. Anybody who was either known to be a Russian or remotely suspected of being one, or who even looked like a Russian, was in imminent danger of his life. Now the notorious story of "poisoning of wells in Alsace by French army surgeons" was circulated. "Hunt for French spies!" promptly read the newest invitation to mob violence. Weird "news" began to fill the Extrablätter. A "Russian spy" had been caught in Unter den Linden, masquerading as a German naval officer. After being beaten into insensibility, he was dragged to Spandau and shot. In another part of town a couple of Russian "secret agents," disguised as women, were caught with "basketfuls of bombs." They, too, we learned, were riddled with bullets an hour later at Spandau. Everywhere, in and out of Berlin, the spy-hunt was now in full cry. An automobile, in which women were traveling, was "reported" to be crossing the country, en route to Russia with "millions of francs of gold." The whole rural population of Prussia turned out to intercept it.

One of the earliest victims of the espionage epidemic was an American newspaperman, Seymour Beach Conger, the chief Berlin correspondent of the Associated Press, who had started for St. Petersburg, where he was formerly stationed, as soon as war became imminent, only to be arrested by the spy-hunting Prussian police at Gumbinnen on the charge of being "a Russian grand-duke." Conger's United States passport, unmistakable journalistic credentials, well-known official status in Berlin and convincingly American exterior availed him not. He had plenty of money and a kodak, and that was enough. He must be a spy. For three days and nights he was locked in a cell, and, even after he had contrived to establish communication with the American Embassy in Berlin, he had great difficulty in securing his release. It was eventually granted on the understanding that he should ignore the Associated Press' orders to proceed to Russia and remain in Berlin for the rest of the war, where, I believe, he still is. I was told, but could never verify, that one of the conditions of Conger's liberation was that he should not "talk about" the affair.

How many hapless persons, Russians, French or unfortunates suspected of being such, with nothing in the world against them more incriminating than their real or imagined nationality, were put out of the way either by German mob savagery, police brutality or fortress firing-squads in those opening forty-eight hours of Armageddon will probably never be known. I do not suppose the Germans themselves know. But this I know--that even at that earliest stage of their sanguinary game they conducted themselves in a manner which, had they done no other single thing during the war to stagger humanity, would brand them as a race of semi-barbarians. Kultur gave a sorry account of itself in the Hottentot days between August 2 and 5, of which I shall have more to say, of a peculiarly personal nature, in a succeeding chapter.

War Sunday in Berlin, midst rumor and spy-chasing, was marked by an impressive open-air divine service on the Konigs-Platz, that vast quadrangle of spread-eagle statuary and gingerbread architecture in which the sepulchral "Avenue of Victory" culminates. In the great area between the Column of Victory and the bulky Bismarck memorial at the foot of the gilt-domed Reichstag building a concourse of many thousands gathered to hear a court chaplain, Doctor Dohring, sermonize eloquently on a text from the Revelation of St. John, chapter II, verse 10: "Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." It was a singularly appropriate theme, for hundreds of reservists, their last day in citizens' clothes, were in the throng. There was a moment of indescribable pathos, as the chaplain, from a dais which raised him high above the heads of the multitude, invoked the huge congregation to recite with him the Lord's Prayer. Strong men and women were in tears when the Amen was reached. The service was brought to a close with a beautiful rendition by that mighty chorus of the Niederländisches Dankgebet, the famous hymn which proclaimed at Waterloo a century before the end of the Napoleonic terror.

Nightfall found those seemingly immobile Berlin thousands still clustered, now almost beseechingly, round the Royal Castle. They hungered for an opportunity to show the Supreme War Lord that Kaiser and Empire were dearer than ever to German hearts in the hour of imminent trial. Just before dark, while his outlines could still be plainly distinguished even by the rearmost ranks of the crowd, William II, thunderously greeted, stepped out once more to the balcony from which he had told the populace two nights previous that the sword was being "forced" into his hand. He beckoned for silence. Men reverently removed their hats, and leaned forward on tiptoes, the better to hear the Imperial message. This is what the Kaiser said:

"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 God 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 Bülow--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 bête noire, would have automatically to cease.

In Ambassador 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 institutions. 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 Männer 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 entitled "What the Colonel Said" was the only presentation of the German military attitude 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 Ambassador suggested, in the always practical way of American diplomacy, that I should assemble 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 Ambassador 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 Embassy for amelioration of my troubles about this time. In fact there were so many others--hundreds and hundreds of them--that the Ambassador 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 Embassy 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 assembled. 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 identity 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 municipal 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 Embassies, Legations and Consulates. The Berlin Ambassador for years put in much valuable time assuaging the grief and disappointment of brother patriots who felt a God-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 assumed 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 assume truly disastrous dimensions. The Embassy was literally jammed with fretting men, and weepy women and children. Every room overflowed with them. The cry was now for passports. 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 Ausländer 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 Embassy that they, too, were stormed by throngs of Americans in various stages of anxiety, fear and financial embarrassment. 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 passport which would designate them as peaceable and peace-loving children of the Stars and Stripes.

The Embassy 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 Attaché, and Mrs. Ruddock, the wife of the Third Secretary, who were at the time the only feminine members of the Embassy family, resourcefully seconded the Ambassadress' 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 Embassy, from the Ambassador 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 Embassy apartments, including the Ambassador's own sanctuary, were turned into offices which looked for all the world like a Census Bureau. Every available space for a desk was usurped by somebody taking applications for passports or filling up the passports 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 Embassy itself, hopelessly understaffed for such an emergency, was, of course, quite unequal to the enormous strain suddenly imposed upon it, so volunteer attachés 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 passport. In another corner sat Henry White, ex-Ambassador in Rome and Paris, scribbling away at breakneck pace, in order that the age, complexion and height of that trembling Vassar 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 municipal 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 Titian-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 Embassy 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 Embassy 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 Ambassador 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 embassy'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 Ambassador" ever accredited to the German court. In my time in Berlin I knew four American ambassadors. 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 hobnobbing 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 ambassador 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 Ambassador, 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 ambassadors among men who have been through the preparatory school from which "Jimmy" Gerard holds a magnum cum laude.

My personal observations of Judge Gerard's ambassadorial 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 ambassador 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. Nobody who knows him ever suspected for a moment that he would. Toadying is not in his lexicon, and aggressively pro-American ambassadors 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.

Mrs. Gerard.

The American Ambassador had been acting for Great Britain in the enemy's country barely thirty-six hours, when Sir Edward Goschen, Great Britain's retiring Ambassador 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 assistance 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 Embassy, 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 assurance that the protection of British subjects and interests could not have been left in more efficient and able hands."

Nobody 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 ambassadors 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 Auswärtiges 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 Embassy would be complete without a reference to the Ambassador'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 Ambassador 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 passport 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 gratitude 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 Embassy family--Lanier Winslow, the Ambassador'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 passport 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 attaché 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 circumstance 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 attitudes, 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 Embassies 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 space 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 principal 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 bass-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 über 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, Mütterchen! Es wird schon gut!" (It will be all right, mother dear! It will be all right!) Thus they returned comfort for tears. "Nicht unterliegen! Besser nicht zurückkehren!" (Don't be beaten! Better not come back at all!) was the good-by greeting blown with the final kisses as many a trainload of embryonic heroes faded slowly from sight beneath the station's gaping archway. Germany was now indubitably convinced that its war was war in a holy cause. The time had come for the Fatherland to rise to the majesty of a great hour. "Auf wiedersehen!" sang the country to the army. But if there was to be no reunion, the army must go down fighting to the last gasp for unsere gerechte Sache, manfully, tirelessly, ruthlessly, till victory was enforced. Such were the inspiring thoughts amid which the boys in field gray trooped off to die for Kaiser and Empire.

The outstanding event of August 3 was the publication of the German Government's famous apologia for the war, the so-called "White Paper" officially described as "Memorandum and Documents in Relation to the Outbreak of the War." Early in the afternoon a telephone message arrived for me at the Adlon to the effect that if I would call at the Press Bureau of the Foreign Office at five o'clock, Legationsrat Heilbron, one of Hammann's lieutenants whom I had known for many years, would be glad to deliver me an advance copy for special transmission to London and New York. I lay great stress on the fact that up to sun-down of August 3, 1914, I continued to be persona gratissima with the Imperial German Government. It was true that one of the young Foreign Office cubs told off to censor press cablegrams at the Main Telegraph Office had, during the preceding three days, expressed annoyance with what he considered my eagerness to "go into details," but Legationsrat Heilbron's invitation to fetch the "White Paper" was gratifying evidence that my relations with the powers-that-be were still "correct," even if not cordial. I was glad of that, because there was constantly in my mind the desire to remain in Germany, whatever happened, with a front-row seat for the big show. At the appointed hour I presented myself in Herr Heilbron's room on the ground floor of the Wilhelmstrasse front of the Foreign Office. He greeted me with old-time courtesy, though I found his demeanor perceptibly depressed. He handed me a copy of the Denkschrift, and, when I begged him for a second one, he complied with a gracious bitte sehr.

A London colleague had already intimated to me that the Imperial Chancellor, desiring to place the German case promptly and fully before the British and American publics, would "do his best" with the military authorities who were now in supreme control of the postal telegraph and cable lines to induce them to allow London and New York correspondents to file exhaustive "stories" on the White Paper. As I was sure, however, that Reuter's Agency for England and the Associated Press for America would be handling the affair at great length, my treatment of it was confined, as was usual under such circumstances, to telegraphing a brief introductory summary.

What struck me instantly as the hall-marks of the German publication were its treatment of the war as an exclusively Russian-provoked Russo-German affair and its brazenly ex-parté character--how ex-parté I did not fully realize till I read England's White Paper a week later. Sir Edward Grey laid his cards on the table, without marginal notes or comment of any kind, and asked the world to pass judgment. Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg's White Paper began with a lengthy plea of justification and ended with quotation of such communications between the Kaiser's Government and its ambassadors and between the German Emperor and the Czar as would most plausibly support the Fatherland's case for war. It was manifestly a biased and incomplete record. It was in fact a doctored record, and suggested that its authors had Bismarck's mutilation of the Ems telegram in mind as a precedent, in emulation of which no German Government could possibly go wrong.

Although compiled to include events up to August 1, the German White Paper was silent as the grave in regard to Belgium and the negotiations with the Government of Great Britain. Issued on the night of August 3, when hundreds of thousands of German troops were waiting at Aix-la-Chapelle for the great assault on Liége--if, indeed, at that hour they were not already across the Belgian frontier--this sacred brief designed to establish the Fatherland's case at the bar of world opinion had no single word to say on what was destined to be almost the supreme issue of the war. It was the last word in Imperial German deception. If the German public had known that Sir Edward Grey on July 30 had already "warned Prince Lichnowsky that Germany must not count upon our standing aside in all circumstances," I imagine its bitterness a few nights later, when the fable of England's "treacherous intervention" was sprung upon the deluded Fatherland, might have been less barbaric in its intensity.

Next to the omission of all reference to what Sir Edward Grey called Germany's "infamous proposal" for the purchase of British neutrality--a pledge not to despoil France of European territory if England would stand with folded arms while Germany violated Belgium and ravished the French Colonial Empire--the striking feature of the Berlin White Paper was the admission of German-Austrian complicity in the humiliation of Serbia. The Foreign Office, as I have previously explained, had zealously affirmed Germany's entire detachment from Austria's programme for avenging Serajevo. What did the White Paper now tell us? That

"Austria had to admit that it would not be consistent either with the dignity or the self-preservation of the Monarchy to look on longer at the operations on the other side of the border without taking action.... We were able to assure our ally most heartily of our agreement with her view of the situation, and to assure her that any action she might consider it necessary to take in order to put an end to the movement in Servia directed against the existence of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy would receive our approval. We were fully aware, in this connection, that warlike moves on the part of Austria-Hungary against Servia would bring Russia into the question, and might draw us into a war in accordance with our duties as an ally."

The historic and ineffaceable fact is that Austria--wabbly, invertebrate Austria, which would even to-day, but for Germany, lay prostrate and vanquished--never made a solitary move in the whole plot to coerce Serbia without the full concurrence of the big brother at Berlin. It would be an insult to the intelligence of German diplomacy, stupid as it is, to imagine that the Kaiser's Government sat mute, unconsulted and nonchalant, while Austria worked out a scheme certain, as the Germans themselves admit in their White Paper, to plunge Europe into war.

It was my privilege on arriving in the United States on August 22, to furnish the New York Times with the first copy of the German White Paper to reach the American public. In preparing a prefatory note to accompany the verbatim translation published in next day's paper, I selected the paragraph above quoted as primâ-facie evidence that the German claim of non-collusion with Austria is subterfuge--to give it the longer and less unparliamentary term.

The German White Paper was prepared formally for the information of the Reichstag, which was summoned to meet on Tuesday, August 4 of imperishable memory, for the purpose of voting $325,000,000 of initial war credits. Paris was not won in the expected six weeks, and the Reichstag has voted $7,500,000,000 of war credits up to this writing (September 1, 1915), with melancholy promise of still more to come. The twenty-four hours preceding the war sitting had not been eventless. Monsieur Sverbieff and the staff of the Russian Embassy were the victims of gross insults from the mob in Unter den Linden, as they left their headquarters in automobiles for the railway station. Mounted police were present to "keep order," but their "vigilance" did not deter German men and youths from spitting in the faces of the Czar's representatives, belaboring them with walking-sticks and umbrellas, and offering rowdy indignities to the women of the ambassadorial party. In front of the French Embassy menacing crowds stood throughout the day and night, waiting for a chance to exhibit German patriotism at Monsieur Cambon's expense. When Señor Polê de Bernábe, the Spanish Ambassador, who was calling to arrange to take over the representation of France during the war, made his appearance, the mob mistook him for Cambon and was just prevented in the nick of time from assaulting the Spaniard. How the French Embassy finally got away from Germany, under circumstances which would have shamed a Fiji Island government, was later related for the benefit of posterity in the French Yellow Book. When I read it months later, I remembered my first German teacher in Berlin, a noblewoman, once telling me, when I asked her how to say "gentleman" in German: "There is no such thing as a 'gentleman' in the German language." That was paraphrased to me by another German on a later occasion, when, discussing the ability of German science, so well demonstrated during this war, to devise a substitute for almost anything, he remarked: "The only thing we can't make is a gentleman, because we never had a proper analysis of the necessary ingredients." The Germans, in their communicative moments, always used to acknowledge that Bismarck was right when he called them "a nation of house-servants." It is impressively exemplified on their stage, which boasts the finest character actors imaginable; but when a German player essays to portray the gentleman, he is grotesque. He gropes helplessly in a strange and unexplored realm.

On the day before the war session of the Reichstag, the Kaiser, more conscious than ever now of his partnership with Deity, ordained Wednesday, August 5, as a day of universal prayer for the success of German arms. Soon after its proclamation, William II, thunderously acclaimed, appeared in Unter den Linden intermittently, en route to conference with high officers of state. He was clad, like every German soldier one now saw, in field-gray, and ready, one heard, to leave for the front at a moment's notice, to take up his post, assigned him by Hohenzollern warrior traditions, on the battlefield in the midst of his loyal legions. Mobilization was now in full swing, and more and more troops were in evidence, crossing town to railway stations from which they were to be transported east or west, as the Staff's emergencies required. A week before, all these soldiers were in Prussian blue. They were gray now, from head to foot, millions of them. Obviously the clothing department of the army had not been taken by "surprise" by the cruel war "forced" on pacific Germany. Three million uniforms can not be turned out in a whole summer--even in Germany. I thought of this, as gray streams, far into the evening, kept pouring through Berlin, and I thought what a marvelously happy selection that peculiar shade of drab-gray, of almost dust-like invisibility from afar, was for field purposes. To shoot at lines no more colorful than that, it seemed to me, would be like banging away at the horizon itself....

History, I suppose, will date Armageddon from August 1, when the German army and navy were mobilized, or perhaps from August 2, when Germany claims that Russia and France fired the first miscreant shots. But the red-letter day of the World Massacre's opening week was beyond all question Tuesday, August 4, which began with the war sitting of the Reichstag and ended with England's declaration of war on Germany. It was destined to be especially big with import for me--of vital import, as events hanging over my unsuspecting head were speedily to reveal.

At midday, two hours before the session of the Reichstag in its own chamber, Parliament was "opened" by the Kaiser personally in the celebrated White Hall of the Royal Castle. I had applied for admission after the few available press tickets were already exhausted, but it was not difficult for me to visualize the scene. I had been in the White Hall on several memorable occasions in the past--during the visit of King Edward VII in February, 1909, at a brilliant State banquet and at the ball which followed; at the wedding of the Emperor's daughter, "the sunshine of my House," Princess Victoria Luise, and Duke Ernest August of Brunswick, in May, 1913; and a month later during the Silver Jubilee celebration of the Kaiser's reign, when our own Mr. Carnegie showered plaudits on the Prince of the world's peace. Tower, of The World and Daily News, was lucky enough to secure a ticket to the Castle ceremonial, and he was bubbling over with excitement at having been privileged to participate in so memorable a function. My old friend, Günther Thomas, late of the Newyorker-Staatszeitung, now joyous in the prospect of joining the German Press Bureau's war staff, came back from the Castle almost pitying me for not having been there. "Wile, I tell you," I can hear him saying now, "it was beautiful, simply beautiful! You missed it! It was enough to make one cry!" Thomas lived in New York seventeen years, but he returned to Germany a more devout Prussian than ever, as a man ought to be whose father fell gloriously at Königgrätz.

The description furnished by my English and Prussian colleagues evidently did not exaggerate the splendor and impressiveness of the scene at the White Hall. The Kaiser, in field-general's gray, entered, escorting the Empress. He was solemn, but not anxious-looking. Around the marble-pillared chamber, where only fifteen months before I had seen the Czar and George V of England tripping the minuet with German princesses as the Kaiser's honored guests, were grouped the first men of the Empire. In the places of distinction, closest to the canopied throne, each according to his Court rank, stood the Imperial Chancellor, General von Moltke, Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz and a score of other eminent officers of the civil, naval and military governments. Among the foreign ambassadors only the representatives of Russia and France were missing from their old-time places. Mr. Gerard, modest and retiring as always, amid the glitter of gold lace and brass buttons flashing on all sides, cut a more than ever self-effacing figure in his diplomatic uniform--the plain evening dress of an American gentleman.

The Kaiser read his War Speech, which he held in his right hand, while the left firmly gripped his sword-hilt. Beginning in a quiet tone, His Majesty's voice appreciably rose in intensity and volume as he approached the kernel of his message which told how "with a heavy heart I have been compelled to mobilize my army against a neighbor with whom it has fought side by side on so many fields of battle." The Imperial Russian Government, William II went on to say, "yielding to the pressure of an insatiable nationalism, has taken sides with a State which by encouraging criminal attacks has brought on the evil of war." That France, also, the Kaiser continued, "placed herself on the side of our enemies could not surprise us. Too often have our efforts to arrive at friendlier relations with the French Republic come in collision with old hopes and ancient malice." And when the Kaiser had ended, with an invitation to "the leaders of the different parties of the Reichstag" (there were no Socialists present) "to come forward and lay their hands in mine as a pledge," the White Hall reverberated with applause which must have seemed almost indecorous in so august an apartment, but which, no doubt, rang true. It was then, I suppose, that Thomas felt like weeping, and so should I, perhaps, had I been there. The Kaiser, his handshaking-bee over, strode from the scene amid an awesome silence, and the statesmen, the generals and the admirals went their respective ways. All was now in readiness for the real Reichstag session, in which words of deathless significance were to fall from the Chancellor's lips.

We were accustomed to sardine-box conditions in the always overcrowded press gallery of the Reichstag on "great days," but to-day we were piled on top of one another in closer formation even than a Prussian infantry platoon in the charge. Familiar faces were missing. Comert, of Le Temps, Caro, of Le Matin, and Bonnefon, of Le Figaro, were not there. They had escaped, we were glad to hear, by one of the very last trains across the French frontier. Löwenton (a brother of Madame Nazimoff), Grossmann, Markoff and Melnikoff, our long-time Russian colleagues, were absent, too. Had they gained Wirballen in time, we wondered, or were they languishing in Spandau?

Doctor Paul Goldmann, doyén of our Berlin corps, was in his accustomed seat, beaming consciously, as became, at such an hour, the correspondent-in-chief of the great allied Vienna Neue Freie Presse. The British and American contingents were on hand in force. Never had we waited for a Kanzlerrede in such electric expectancy. "Copy" in plenty, such as none of us had ever telegraphed before, was about to be made. Goldmann, a Foreign Office favorite, as well as the all-around most popular foreign journalist in Berlin, may have had an advance hint what was coming, as he frequently did, but to the vast majority of us--British, American, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Swiss, Spanish and Danish, sandwiched there in the Pressloge so closely that we could hear, but not move--I am certain that the momentous words and extraordinary scenes about to ensue came as a staggering revelation.

Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg, who is flattered when told that he looks like Abraham Lincoln--the resemblance ends there--began speaking at three-fifteen o'clock. Gaunt and fatigued, he tugged nervously at the portfolio of documents on the desk in front of him during the brief introductory remarks of the President of the House, the patriarchal, white-bearded Doctor Kaempf. The Chancellor's manner gave no indication that before he resumed his seat he would rise to heights of oratorical fire of which no one ever thought that "incarnation of passionate doctrinarianism" capable. What he said is known to all the world now; how, in Bismarckian accents, he thundered that "we are in a state of self-defense and necessity knows no law!" How he confessed that "our troops, which have already occupied Luxemburg, may perhaps already have set foot on Belgian territory." How he acknowledged, in a succeeding phrase, to Germany's eternal guilt, that "that violates international law." How he proclaimed the amazing doctrine that, confronted by such emergencies as Germany now was, she had but one duty--"to hack her way through, even though--I say it quite frankly--we are doing wrong!" Our heads, I think, fairly swam as the terrible portent of these words sank into our consciousness. "Our troops may perhaps already have set foot on Belgian soil." That meant one thing, with absolute certainty. It denoted war with England. Trifles have a habit at such moments of lodging themselves firmly in one's mind; and I remember distinctly how, when I heard Bethmann Hollweg fling that challenge forth, I leaned over impulsively to my Swedish friend, Siosteen, of the Goteborg Tidningen, and whispered: "That settles it. England's in it now, too." Siosteen nods an excited assent. It is in the midst of one of the frequent intervals in which the House, floor and galleries alike, is now venting its impassioned approval of the Chancellor's words. I had heard Bülow and Bebel and Bethmann Hollweg himself, times innumerable, set the Reichstag rocking with fervid demonstrations of approval or hostility, but never has it throbbed with such life as to-day. It is the incarnation of the inflamed war spirit of the land. The more defiant the Chancellor's diction, the more fervid the applause it evokes. "Sehr richtig! Sehr richtig!" the House shrieks back at him in chorus as he details, step by step, how Germany has been "forced" to draw her terrible sword to beat back the "Russian mobilization menace," how she has tried and failed to bargain with England and Belgium, how she has kept the dogs of war chained to the last, and only released them now when destruction, imminent and certain, is upon her.

All eyes in the Press Gallery are riveted on the broad left arc of the floor usurped by the one hundred and eleven Social Democratic deputies of the House of three hundred and ninety-seven members. For the first time in German history their cheers are mingling with those of other parties in support of a Government policy. That, after the Belgian revelation, is beyond all question the dominating feature of a scene tremendous with meaning in countless respects. There is nothing perfunctory about the "Reds'" enthusiasm; that is plain. It is real, spontaneous, universal. No man of them keeps his seat. All are on their feet, succumbing to the engulfing magnitude of the moment. That, it instantly occurs to us, means much to Germany at such an hour. It means that the hope which more than one of the Fatherland's prospective foes in years gone by has fondly cherished, of Socialist revolt in the hour of Germany's peril, was illusory hope. The Chancellor knows what it means. "Our army is in the field!" he declares, trembling with emotion. "Our fleet is ready for battle! The whole German nation stands behind them!" As one man, the entire Reichstag now rises, shouting its approval of these historic words in tones of frenzied exaltation. For two full minutes pandemonium reigns unchecked. Bethmann Hollweg is turning to the Social Democrats. His fist is clenched and he brandishes it in their direction--not in anger this time, but in triumph--and, as if he were proclaiming the proud sentiment for all the world to hear, he exclaims, at the top of his voice, "Yea, the whole nation!" Thus was Armageddon born. Germany, all present knew, would be at war before another sun had gone down, not only with Russia and France, but with England, and, of course, with Belgium, too.

"Supposing the Belgians resist?" I asked Schmidt, of the B. Z. am Mittag, a German colleague whom I once christened Berlin's "star" reporter, as we wandered, thinking hard, back to Unter den Linden.

"Resist?" he replied, half pitying the feeble-mindedness which prompted such a question. "We shall simply spill them into the ocean."

CHAPTER X

THE WAR REACHES ME

"We are not barbarians, my dear Wile!" exclaimed Günther Thomas, when we met in the Adlon after the Reichstag sitting, in reply to my query about the safety of correspondents of English newspapers, now that Germany was about to annex Great Britain as an enemy in addition to Russia and France. I had found Thomas during ten years of acquaintance the best-informed German journalist I ever knew. His long residence in Park Row had grafted a "news nose" on him, which, coupled with a profound knowledge of the history and present-day undercurrents of his own country, made him an ideal and valuable colleague. I treasure my relations with him in grateful recollection. One required occasionally to dilute both his news and views with a strong solution of skepticism, for Thomas was both a Prussian patriot and representative of Mr. Ridder's New-Yorker Staatszeitung. But nine times out of ten his counsel and information were like Cæsar's wife. His assurance to me on the evening of August 4, 1914, that his countrymen "were not barbarians" was the most misleading piece of news he ever supplied me.

The imminence of hostilities with England revived irresistibly in my mind the qualms which had filled the Germans for a week previous on this very point. "What will the English do?" was the question they constantly flung at any one they thought likely to be able to answer it intelligently. It was the thing which gave themselves the most anxious heart-searching. The "war on two fronts," the purely Continental affair with the Dual Alliance, filled the average German with no concern. The Kaiser's military machine had been constructed to deal with France and Russia combined, and no German ever for a moment doubted its ability to do so. Events of the past year, I think it may fairly be said, have justified that confidence, for I suppose no expert anywhere in the world doubts but that for the presence of British sea power on France and Russia's side, the German eagle would in all probability now be screaming in triumph over Paris and Petrograd. But with the British "in," dozens of Germans confessed, as my own ears can bear testimony, their case was "hopeless." Few of them were persuaded that Germany could, in Bismarck's picturesque phrase, "deal with the British Navy in Paris." While the prospect of having to fight France and Russia did not disturb the Germans, the possibility of having to battle with Britain simultaneously filled them with undisguised alarm. They would not admit it now, but in the fading hours of July, 1914, and the opening days of August, it was a nightmare which pressed down so heavily upon their consciousness that they never spoke of it except in accents of dread. The Hate cult had not yet toppled their reason. Lissauer's demoniacal ballad was still unwritten. In those anguished moments they talked of England, when not in terms of outright fear, as the "brother nation" of kindred blood and ideals with whom war was unthinkable because it would be nothing short of "civil war." Doctor Hecksher, a well-known National Liberal member of the Reichstag and Stimmungsmacher (henchman) of the Foreign Office, busily assured English newspaper correspondents of the "horror" with which the mere idea of conflict with England filled the German soul. I thought it queer that one of my last dispatches to London, before Anglo-German telegraphic communication snapped, containing Doctor Hecksher's views and mentioning him by name, was ruthlessly censored in Berlin and returned to me as untransmissible. That meant one of two things--that Doctor Hecksher was wrong in attributing to Germany overweening desires of peace with England, or that it was unwise to let me indicate that Teuton knees were quaking at the prospect of war with her. Certainly lachrymose expressions of hope that England would not feel called upon to "intervene" in Germany's "just quarrel" with her neighbors were common to the point of universality in Berlin on the eve of the clash. They were born of inherent conviction that German aspirations of imposing Hohenzollern hegemony on the Continent must and would be wrecked by England's adherence to her century-old policy of opposing so vital a disturbance in the balance of European power.

Uppermost in my mind just now was how to transmit at least the vital passages of the Chancellor's "Necessity knows no law speech" to The Daily Mail. A merely informative bulletin about it to the editor had just been brought back from the Main Telegraph Office by my faithful young German secretary, Arthur Schrape, with the message that "no more dispatches to England are being accepted." That was about six o'clock P.M., at least three hours before Berlin or the world generally had any knowledge that England and Germany were actually at grips. Communication with the United States, Schrape had been told, was still open, so the most natural thing in the world was to attempt to get Bethmann Hollweg's crucial statements to London by way of New York. Then followed a decision on my part which was to prove my undoing--I committed the diabolical and treasonable crime of calling up my friend and colleague, Mackenzie, the able correspondent of the London Times (like my own paper, The Daily Mail, the property of Lord Northcliffe), and discussing with him the feasibility of cabling the New York representatives of our respective papers to relay to London the news which we were unable to send directly from Berlin. We were telephoning in German, of course, as every one for three days past had been required to do, and we realized that practically every conversation, especially between highly suspicious characters like long-accredited Berlin newspaper correspondents, was being overheard by some spy with an ear glued to a receiver. Knowing all this perfectly well, we talked with entire freedom of our nefarious scheme for undermining the safety of the German Empire. Finally it was agreed that Mackenzie should come to my rooms in the Adlon and arrange with me there the text of a cablegram to New York which should bottle up the German fleet, encircle the Crown Prince's army and generally wreck the Kaiser's plans for subjugating Europe, even before the ink on the General Staff's plans was dry. We agreed that the surest way of striking this blow for England was to cable to New York a message whose veiled language would disclose to even the most stupid eye that it concealed a plot of heinous proportions. It was decided that we should concoct in cable language a cablegram reading like this:

"Chancellor just delivered importantest speech Reichstag. As communication England unlonger possible suggest your cabling Newyorks news."

Mackenzie, accompanied by his assistant, Jelf, now a volunteer-officer in Kitchener's army, arrived at the Adlon; we canvassed the New York suggestion in detail--amid such secrecy that Schrape, a very keen-eared German of twenty-two and a patriot, who is also serving his Kaiser and Empire in field-gray, was permitted to participate in our deliberations. Then we came to the most treacherous decision of all, viz., not to carry out our grandiose project for confounding the German War Party's plot. But we had gone far enough. We were discovered. Our machinations, though we knew it not, were seen through, our guns were spiked, and all that remained was to put us, as soon as possible, where we could do no further harm. Any number of Frenchmen and Russians were already in the same place.

Carelessly leaving behind me my typewriting-machine, fifty-pfennig map of the North Sea, copies of my preceding week's cablegrams, scissors, paste-pot, carbon-paper, the latest Berlin newspapers, and other telltale emblems of my infamy, I went to the American Embassy to discuss the latest and obviously greatest turn of the war kaleidoscope with Judge Gerard. There were a thousand and one questions to level at him. Was it true that Sir Edward Goschen had already asked him to take charge of Great Britain's interests? What would panic-stricken American war refugees do now, with British warships blockading the German coasts? Would it any longer be safe in Berlin for our people to talk their own language in public? Would the United States Government be making any declaration of neutrality, or something of that sort, to the German Government? Was the Embassy still in direct communication with Washington? Could it facilitate the transmission of our news-cablegrams to New York or Chicago? These were the things the journalistic brethren en masse were anxious to know--and I recall vividly that the Ambassador and his staff, despite a week of worries unprecedented, were still smiling and managing to reply to every question, however abstract or unanswerable, with invincible equanimity. I have since heard that there were fellow citizens who found Gerard, Grew, Harvey and Ruddock "inattentive." I suppose they were the patriots who couldn't understand why local checks on the First National Bank of Roaring Branch, Pennsylvania, "weren't good" at the Embassy, and who were "peeved" because the Ambassador couldn't tell them why Uncle Sam hadn't already started a fleet of dreadnoughts and liners-de-luxe to Hamburg and Bremen to rescue his stranded tourist family. Or one of the complainants, who was "going to write to Bryan" about our "inefficient diplomatic service," may have been that plutocratic dame from Boston who demanded that Gerard should at least be able to commandeer "a special train" for the Americans, even if every military line in all Germany was at that hour choked with troop-transports. And yet we Yankees rank in effete Europe as a cool-headed and common-sense race!

What dominated my thoughts, of course, was whether, after all, I was now to be allowed to remain in Germany. My desire to do so was never stronger--to sit on the edge of history in the making at such a moment. Judge Gerard resolved my doubts. I should "cheer up" and hope for the best. I tarried for a moment longer, to chat over the day's overwhelming developments with Mrs. Gerard, with whom I had not had my usual daily cup of tea and war conference. We wondered how long it would be before a formal declaration of war between England and Germany would be declared. I spoke of my pleasurable anticipation at being permitted to live through the mighty days ahead of us in Berlin with herself and the Ambassador. They would be experiences worthy of transmission to grandchildren. We agreed we should be privileged mortals, in a way, to be vouchsafed so tremendous an opportunity. I commented on Mrs. Gerard's amazing lack of fatigue after four days and nights of trials and tribulations with terror-stricken compatriots. She spoke of the lively satisfaction it had given her to be of service of so homely and homespun a character, and remarked that young Mrs. Ruddock had been "a perfect brick" through it all, an aide-de-camp whom a field-marshal might have envied....