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 Buelow--it was at one of his so-called "parliamentary
evenings" at the Imperial Chancellor's Palace during the political
season,--he inquired, pleasantly:
"How long are you remaining in Germany?"
"Just as long as Your Serene Highness will permit," I responded, half
facetiously and half seriously, for foreign correspondents are
occasionally expelled from Germany for pernicious professional activity.
For the ten days preceding August 1, 1914, while the European cloudburst
was gathering momentum, such time as I could spare from the chase for
the nimble item was devoted to patching up my journalistic fences in
Berlin, with a view to remaining there throughout the war. There was at
that time no conclusive indication that England would be involved.
Having seen Germany in full and magnificent stride in peace, I was
overwhelmingly anxious to watch her in the practise of her real
profession. As an American citizen and special correspondent of three
great American newspapers--the _New York Times, Philadelphia Public
Ledger_ and _Chicago Tribune_--and fully accredited as such in German
official quarters, I had every reason to hope that, even if England were
drawn into the war (as to which I, myself, was never in doubt), my
previous status as Berlin correspondent of Lord Northcliffe's _Daily
Mail_ would not interfere with my remaining in Germany as an American
writing exclusively for American papers. It was, of course, obvious
that if this permission were granted me, my connection with the British
news organization, which for years was Germany's _bete noire_, would
have automatically to cease.
In 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 _Maenner 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
_Auslaender_ 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 Attache, 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 attaches and clerks were gladly pressed into service.
There, for instance, sat a Guggenheim copper magnate, who probably never
lifts a pen except to sign a million-dollar check, at work with a
mantel-piece as a desk, recording the vital statistics of a Vermont
grocery-man who wanted a 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.
[Illustration: 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 _Auswaertiges 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.