AUGUST FOURTH
Germany's war Juggernaut by the morning of Monday, August 3, was in
full, but incredibly noiseless, motion. I always knew it was a
magnificently well greased machine, geared for the maximum of silence,
but I felt sure it could not swing into action without some
reverberating creaks. Yet Berlin externally had been far more
feverishly agitated on Spring Parade days at recurring ends of May than
it was now, with "enemies all around" and that "war on two fronts,"
which most Germans used to talk about as something, _Gott sei Dank_,
they would never live to see. One's male friends of military age--it
was now the second day of mobilization--kept on melting away from hour
to hour, but amid a complete lack of fuss and bustle. It almost seemed
as if the army had orders to rush to the fighting-line in gum-shoes and
that everything on wheels had rubber tires. As the Fatherland for years
had armed in silence, so she was going to battle. We saw no
seventeen-inch guns rumbling to the front. Those were Germany's
best-concealed weapons. A military attache of one of the chief
belligerents, who lived in Berlin for four years preceding the war, has
since confessed that he never even knew of the "Big Berthas'" existence!
Germany girding for Armageddon was distinctly a disappointment. I
entirely agreed with a portly dowager from the Middle West, who, between
frettings about when she could get a train to the Dutch frontier,
continually expressed her chagrin at such "a poor show." She imagined,
like a good many of the rest of us, that mobilization in Germany would
at the very least see the Supreme War Lord bolting madly up and down
_Unter den Linden_, plunging silver spurs into a foaming white charger
and brandishing a glistening sword in martial gestures as Caruso does
when he plays Radames in the finale of the second act of Aida. Verdi's
Egyptian epic is the Kaiser's favorite opera, and he ought to have
remembered, we thought, how a conquering hero should demean himself at
such a blood-stirring hour. At least Berlin, we hoped, would rise to
the occasion, and thunder and rock with the pomp and 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 ueber 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, Muetterchen! 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 zurueckkehren!_" (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-parte_ character--how
_ex-parte_ 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 Liege--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 _prima-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 Senor Pole de Bernabe, 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,
Guenther 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 Koeniggraetz.
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. Loewenton (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, _doyen_ 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 Buelow
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."