Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: Cover]
[Illustration: 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
I. The Curtain Raiser
II. The First Act
III. The Plot Develops
IV. The Stage Managers
V. Slow Music
VI. The Climax
VII. War
VIII. The Americans
IX. August Fourth
X. The War Reaches Me
XI. The Last Farewell
XII. Safe Conduct
XIII. Complacency Rules The Waves
XIV. Pro-Ally Uncle Sam
XV. The Helmsmen
XVI. The General, The Admiral and the King
XVII. "Your King And Country Want You"
XVIII. War in the Dark
XIX. The Internal Foe
XX. The Empire of Hate
XXI. The New England
XXII. 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, ueber 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 fete 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
Brunsbuettel for the annual regatta of the North German Yacht Squadron,
a club consisting for the most part of Hamburg, Bremen and Luebeck
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.
[Illustration: 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 Buelow 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 Buelow's successor timorously suggested
from time to time, as he did, the foolhardiness of a programme which
meant, in an historic phrase of Buelow'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.