SAFE CONDUCT
Lehrter Bahnhof, the gateway through which so many American tourists
have passed out of Berlin en route to Hamburg or Bremen steamers, was
not _en fete_ in honor of the departing _Englaender_. My memory
traveled back irresistibly to the last time the British Embassy in force
was assembled there--to greet King George and Queen Mary when they
arrived to visit the German Court in May, 1913. The rafters rang on that
occasion with the blare of a Prussian Guards band thundering _God Save
the King_, cousins George and William embraced fondly and kissed, and
the station was swathed in the entwined colors of Germany and England.
It was a different and forbidding aspect which the old brick and steel
barn of a train-shed presented this muggy August morning. At every
entrance sentries in gray and policemen with Brownings at the belt stood
guard, for railways and stations were now as integral a part of the
war-machine as fortresses and guns. Inside, infantrymen in gray from
head to foot--all Germany had now grown gray--carrying rifles with fixed
bayonets patrolled the platforms, searching each Englishman, as he came
along, with glances mingling watchfulness and contempt.
Our band of pilgrims, who were to be some forty or fifty in all, arrived
in detachments, having, as Sir Edward Goschen himself officially
described it, "been smuggled away from the Embassy in taxicabs by side
streets." The Ambassador himself was one of the last to turn up. No
Imperial emissary came to wish him a happy journey and _Auf
Wiedersehen_, though the Foreign Secretary deputized young Count Wedel
to say good-by in his name. The Kaiser's farewell greeting to Sir
Edward was conveyed the day before, when the All-Highest sent an
adjutant with majestic regrets for the sacking of the Embassy premises
on the night the war broke out. Of markedly less apologetic tenor was
the adjutant's message that William II, "now that Great Britain had
taken sides with other nations against her old allies of Waterloo, must
at once divest himself of the titles of British Field Marshal and
British Admiral." The uniforms, orders and decorations conferred on him
by Perfidious Albion had desecrated the exalted person of the supreme
Hohenzollern for the last time. In the memorable dispatch in which he
so dispassionately narrated his final hours in Berlin, Sir Edward
Goschen sufficiently indicated the true character of the Kaiser's
_adieu_ by mentioning that "the message lost none of its acerbity by the
manner of its delivery." As a Prussian officer was firing it at the
official incarnation of Great Britain, it is not difficult to imagine
the mien and tone of the proud functionary on whom had been conferred
the historic distinction of breathing Hate in the face of the foe at
that cataclysmic hour.
I shall always hold it a privilege to have been in contact with Sir
Edward Goschen during the days which preceded the war and in the hours
of its beginning. He was throughout an object-lesson in
imperturbability. In the midst of his holidays in England when the
crisis arose, having left Kiel early in July with the British squadron,
he returned hurriedly to his post in Berlin just before the match was
applied to the powder-barrel. I recall distinctly the invincible state
of his good humor when I visited him at the Embassy on July 31, only an
hour or two before the Kaiser declared Germany to be in "a state of
war."
"Wile," he remarked, fastening upon me a gaze which very successfully
simulated vexation, "what did you mean by libeling me in that dispatch
of yours from Kiel on the Kaiser's visit to our flagship? You had the
effrontery to suggest that I was lolling about the quarter-deck in a
tweed suit. I would have you understand that my costume afloat is
always the regulation navy-blue!"
I pleaded color-blindness. I said that from our perch behind the
thirteen-and-one-half-inch gun turret for'd, it looked to me as if His
Excellency had actually worn tweed.
"Well, I didn't," he insisted, "and you caused me to be twitted not a
little in London for my apparent ignorance of battleship etiquette."
Sir Edward Goschen, unlike other British Ambassadors I knew in Berlin,
was never at any moment of his career there under any delusions as to
the _leitmotif_ of German policy toward Great Britain. No Teutonic wool
was ever pulled over his eyes. During the week of tension which ended
with war, he bore himself with tact and firmness characteristic of the
highest diplomatic traditions. Though never surrendering a position in
the trying negotiations with the Kaiser's Government, the Ambassador did
not cease, up to the hour when he asked for his passports, to labor for
such peace as would be consistent with British interests. It is not
customary in the British service, I believe, to send a diplomatic
official back to a country with which England has meantime been at war,
but Sir Edward Goschen could return to Berlin with his head high,
enjoying not only, I am sure, the limitless confidence of his own
Government, but the unalloyed respect of Germany, as well.
Our party having been politely herded into the royal waiting-room of the
station, a couple of silk-hatted and frock-coated young Foreign Office
officials now buzzed busily about us, checking off our respective names
and identities on their duplicate lists, lest no unauthorized
_Englaender_ should escape through the ring of steel drawn tight around
Germany's frontiers. Our safe-conduct train had now pulled in. We
found ourselves a somewhat indiscriminate collection of refugees.
Besides Sir Edward Goschen, there was, of course, the full embassy
family of secretaries, attaches, clerks, the wives of one or two of
them, and one bonnie group of babes with their blue-and-white "nannies."
Sir Horace Rumbold, the Counselor of the Embassy, who had conducted the
initial negotiations with Germany, monocled and unruffled, was as calm
as if he were starting off for a week-end in the country. Captain
Henderson, the Naval Attache, and a prince of sailormen, had no inkling
of the undying discomfiture soon to be his, as an ingloriously interned
captive in neutral Holland, for his first assignment from the Admiralty
was to command a detachment of the ill-starred naval expedition to
Antwerp. Colonel Russell, the Military Attache, was quitting German soil
with emotions a little different from those of the rest of us, for he
had seen the light of day at Potsdam in 1874, while his late father,
Lord Ampthill, was British Ambassador to Germany. It was only a few
weeks previous that the colonel's own Berlin-born son had been
christened "William" under the august Godfatherhood of the Kaiser, who
sent the babe a golden cup emblazoned with the Hohenzollern arms. With
us, too, were Messrs. Gurney, Rattigan, Monck, Thomas and Astell, Sir
Edward Goschen's able staff of secretaries and young attaches, who had
all "sat tight," in their British way, so splendidly during the
preceding forty-eight hours. The official party also included the
British Minister to Saxony, Mr. Grant-Duff, and Lady Grant-Duff, whose
windows in Dresden had been broken, too, and Messrs. Charlton and Turner
of the Berlin and Leipzig consulates, respectively.
The journalist-refugees consisted of Mackenzie and Jelf of _The Times_,
Tower and Nevinson of _The Daily News_, Long of _The Westminster
Gazette_, Lawrence of Reuter's Agency, Byles of _The Standard_, Dudley
Ward, of the _Manchester Guardian_ and his newly-wed German wife, and
Muirhead, the "camera man" of _The Daily Chronicle_. Poor Jelf, who
enlisted within a week after his arrival in England, was killed in
action during the great offensive fighting in Artois, in September,
1915. Among the others whom Sir Edward Goschen had rescued from the
maws of Hate was a little Australian woman, Mrs. Gunderson, trapped in
Germany with her husband at the outbreak of war. They had journeyed
around the world on their honeymoon to enable him to participate in an
international chess match at Mannheim. He has been stalemated ever
since at the British concentration camp at Ruhleben--Berlin. Then there
was an estimable old English couple who had spent a night in jail on the
charge of being "spies" prowling about the German countryside in their
touring-car. They were not bemoaning the loss of their automobile in
the presence of their own escape and that of their chauffeur. One of
the luckiest of our traveling companions was Captain Deedes, a British
army officer who was passing through Germany on his way home from
service in Turkey, and just gained the precincts of the British Embassy
before being nabbed by the police. We shuddered to think of the fate of
Captain Holland of the British navy, also en route from Constantinople,
who had not been so fortunate, and was now locked up at Spandau. I was
the sole and lonely American member of the caravan.
The Germans provided Sir Edward Goschen with a "corridor train" of
first-class cars, including "saloon carriages," which are a combination
of parlor and sleeping cars, for himself and his immediate entourage,
and for Baron Beyens, the Belgian Minister to Berlin, and his staff,
who, appropriately enough, were conducted to the frontier along with the
British. Baron Beyens has contributed to the genesis of the war not the
least noteworthy evidence of Germany's felonious designs on European
liberties and peace. As has been revealed by a Belgian Grey Book, the
Baron was able to report to his government as early as July 26 that "the
German General Staff regarded war as inevitable and near, and expected
success on account of Germany's superiority in heavy guns and the
unpreparedness of Russia." Baron Beyens also described his final and
dramatic conversation with the German Foreign Secretary, who "announced
with pain" Germany's determination to violate Belgian neutrality, and
asked to be allowed to occupy Liege. The request was refused, Herr von
Jagow admitting to the Minister that no other answer was possible. The
Belgians had another "answer" up their sleeve, though von Jagow knew it
not. It was the shambles into which the flower of the German Guard
plunged at Liege a week later.
[Illustration: Berlin newspaper refugees on S. S. St. Petersburg. From
left to right, standing: Muirhead; Wile; Jelf; Lawrence; Nevinson;
Captain Deedes; Dudley Ward. Seated, Mackenzie.]
Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar, a dapper little gray-haired Prussian
officer with a Kaiser mustache and a heel-clicking manner, presently
approached Sir Edward Goschen, saluted, introduced himself as the
military chaperon of the party, and invited us to troop into the train.
An armed guard, a strapping infantryman with glistening bayonet affixed
to his shouldered rifle, was already aboard. He turned out, as did the
lieutenant-colonel himself, to be a very harmless warden. When the
_Oberstleutnant_, gloved and helmeted as if on dress parade, was not
snoozing or reading during the journey, he merely hovered about,
mother-like, to see that his charges were comfortable, as well as not up
to mischief. In addition to the ordinary train-crew, we were shepherded
by seven or eight plain-clothes Prussian detectives, whom even the ruse
of regulation railway-caps could not disguise. You can tell a German
"secret policeman," as he is idiomatically called, at least a mile off.
He is the last word in palpability.
Our destination, we learned, was the Hook of Holland, where either a
Great Eastern steamer or a British cruiser would pick us up. We were to
travel via Hanover-Osnabrueck to Amsterdam and thence to the sea.
Mackenzie, Jelf and I, having preempted a compartment, settled down at
the windows for a last long look at Berlin as the train now tugged
slowly out of the station, a few minutes past eight o'clock. Speaking
for myself, I am quite sure that railway trucks never rattled with such
sweet melody as those beneath us were producing, for with every chug
they were bringing us nearer to liberty. I remember a distinct feeling
of consciousness that I should not consider myself an utterly freed
felon until German territory was actually no longer under my feet. It
was an indescribably gratifying sensation, all sufficient for the
moment, to realize that Berlin at least was fading into oblivion.
Whether any of my British colleagues were throbbing with similar
emotions, I never knew. It is un-English, I believe, to reveal emotions
even if one is battling with them. Whatever thoughts were in their
minds, I myself was obsessed with a distinct desire, at that moment, to
blot Berlin from my mind for all eternity. Perhaps, as I thus
soliloquized, I was giving way unconsciously to a passing spell of that
unreasoning malice which infested hate-maddened Berlin. I suppose I
ought to have shed briny tears, as we skirted Spandau and sped across
the dreary plain of the Mark of Brandenburg, and familiar landmarks
passed from view. Certainly in the long ago, I had firmly made up my
mind that when my time to leave Germany came I should go away with
genuine regret. Life in the Fatherland had meant much to me and mine.
Although I never adopted it, like Lord Haldane, as my "spiritual home,"
a man can not spend thirteen years of middle life in the same community,
however alien to its spirit and institutions, without forming
deep-rooted attachments. But the circumstances which precipitated me
out of Germany conspired, I fear, to quench old-time affection. So,
ungrateful as it may appear, my handkerchief was not brought into play
and my eyes were uncommonly dry as the sand-wastes of Brandenburg
vanished from our vision....
It was evident that we were in for a tedious journey and that our trek
across Western Germany was to be agony long drawn out. Berlin to
Hanover, the first leg of the trip, was one I had accomplished times
innumerable under three hours, and even a _Bummelzug_ hardly took
longer. It was to take us nearly three times as long to-day.
Mobilization was technically complete, but every railway track in the
country, especially if it fed the great trunk-line to the west along
which we were traveling, was still choked with troop trains. In
consequence, though ours was a "special," we had to halt, back up,
sidetrack and perform every other gyration of which a train is capable,
whenever we came up with battalions en route toward one of the three
frontiers on which German blood was now being spilled. At every station
we encountered trainloads of men in gray, singing, cheering and laughing
as if bound for a picnic instead of slaughter. It was always they who
had the right of way, for it was soon borne in upon us that the meanest
detachment of reservists bulked larger in Germany's eye just then than
"the whole bally British diplomatic service put together," as Jelf
irreverently expressed it. Never at any time were we doing anything
dizzier than twenty miles an hour, and we figured that if we reached
Hanover by dinner-time, we should be fortunate. As to London, which we
used to reach twenty hours after leaving Berlin, it became painfully
obvious that it would be nearer forty this trip.
But there was much to see, and to think and talk about. As we were
being held up everywhere along the line by seemingly the entire male
population of the Empire in uniform, it was not surprising, for one
thing, to find the fields on either side of us as denuded of men as if
Adam had never lived. None but women was discoverable at work on this
eve of harvest, excepting here and there an old man, while children,
too, were being pressed into service. At bridges, culverts and
crossings, instead of the customary railway guards, who used to stand at
salute with a flag as a train whirled past, there were now soldiers with
rifles. No restrictions were placed upon our reconnoitering the
adjacent country as long as we were in motion; but Lieutenant-Colonel
von Buttlar, always heel-clicking and saluting beforehand, intimated to
_Mein Herren_ that the curtains of their compartment-windows must be
drawn as the train approached or halted at stations. There was no
suspicion, he begged to assure us, that we might attempt to practise
espionage about troop movements. On the contrary, the suggestion was a
precaution recommended in our own interests. Unfortunately, quoth the
apologetic colonel, it had not been feasible to conceal the identity of
our train. Western Germany was bursting with patriotic frenzy, and it
was just within the range of possibilities that their exuberance might
beat itself into disagreeable "demonstrations." Therefore, discretion
was obviously our cue.
But what we could not see at Nauen, Rathenow, Stendal, Gardelegen,
Obisfelde and Lehrte, we could hear, for all the inhabitants of every
hamlet and town in Central Germany appeared to have orders from
somewhere to assemble at their railway-stations and sing themselves red
in the face for Kaiser and Empire. Manifestly the Supreme War Lord had
not only called up his armed legions, but mobilized the country's
_Singvereine_ besides, and man, woman and child of them were now in the
trenches with their throats bared to the foe. I suppose they were
chanting _Die Wacht am Rhein_ and _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_
in other parts of Germany, too, but I have often thought that the
country's most vociferous and tireless choral artists were concentrated
on that day on the strategic line of the British safe-conduct train's
route. If the Great General Staff at Berlin, with that incomparable
attention to detail which is one of its vaunted accomplishments, schemed
to send us out of Germany convinced, by the evidence of our own ears,
that the Kaiser's people were sallying forth to war like Wagnerian
heroes with music and triumphant cheers on their lips, the plan
succeeded. My own indelible recollection of that farewell ride across
Germany, at any rate, is the memory of song. For many days and nights
afterward, _Die Wacht am Rhein_ and _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber
Alles_, would ring and ring through my head. At the time it all seemed
beautifully spontaneous, for the Germans are a singing folk, who put
soul into their anthems, but reflection makes me wonder if that
continuous song-service which so mercilessly accompanied us from Berlin
to the Netherlands was not a stage-managed extravaganza with a motive.
The Germans are a thorough race, and in war they overlook no
opportunity.
It was only at times that the singing was anything else than merely
monotonous--the periodical occasions when, if we halted longer than
usual at a station, the singers would line up alongside the train so
closely that they could fairly shout in our ears. Then there would be a
note of ill-mannered defiance in their song. At Hanover we happened to
be drawn up in the station at the very moment when the British
Ambassador and the Belgian Minister were in the dining-car, and there
was a particularly vehement vocal endurance competition outside of the
window at which they were sitting. But from my own table on the opposite
side of the car I observed that Sir Edward Goschen was not visibly
diverted from his _Wiener-Schnitzel_, for, while the _Deutschland,
Deutschland ueber Alles_ was doing its worst, he remarked, cheerily, to
his Belgian colleague: "Rather fine singing, isn't it?"
Next to the songs which knew no ending the most conspicuous
manifestation of _Furor Teutonicus_ was the chalking of troop-trains
with exuberant inscriptions symbolical of expected great German
victories to come. "Special to St. Petersburg" was a prime favorite.
"Excursion to Paris" was extremely popular. That, we know, is exactly
what the War Party expected the campaign to be. "Through Train to
Moscow" ran a particularly sanguine sentiment and "Death to the
Blood-Czar," a more sanguinary one. Then there would be rude
caricatures of Nicholas II or President Poincare either at the end of a
noose or of the boot of an equally rudely-cartooned Kaiser. And, of
course, there were plenty of jests at Great Britain. "We'll soon be
chewing roast-beef in London" was the way one artist epitomized his
hopes. "Special Train to the Peddler-City"--a shaft at London, the home
of the "shopkeeper nation" which "organized war against Germany" in
order to "crush an unpleasant commercial rival." "Death to our
enviers!" was the language in which another Anglophobe thought found
expression. Beneath the British Ambassador's car-windows, I was told,
some one had chalked a John Bull drooping ignominiously from the
gallows, with "Race-Traitor" for an epitaph!
The night was fitful for us all. Curled up on the seats of our
compartments, such attempts at sleep as we ventured were effectually
defeated by _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_ and _Die Wacht am
Rhein_. All through the night they were hurled at us. At every town,
regardless of the hour, the choristers were on the job. We welcomed our
arrival at Bentheim, the final station in Prussia, at seven next
morning, not half so eagerly because it was the last of Germany as
because it was the last of _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_ and
_Die Wacht am Rhein_. For any sins we ever committed in the Fatherland,
we felt we had been richly chastised. I understood now why General
Sherman once crossed the Atlantic to escape _Marching through
Georgia_--only to be bombarded with it beneath his windows before
breakfast by an Irish band in Queenstown before he had been in Europe
twelve hours. I am morally certain that when old Tecumseh said that
"War is hell," he was thinking about _Marching through Georgia_. That
is what _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_ made me think about
Armageddon.
None of us experienced any special difficulty in restraining our
emotions when Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar and our other German
chaperons handed us over at Bentheim to a Dutch train crew awaiting our
arrival there with a Dutch locomotive. The colonel clicked and bowed
his farewell respects to Sir Edward Goschen and Baron Beyens, accepted
their appreciations of his courtesy and helpfulness, saluted for the
last time, and then formally transferred us to Queen Wilhelmina's tender
mercies. The hour of our liberation was at hand. And for the first
time in a week a score of Englishmen and at least one American thought
out aloud their opinions about Germany and all her works. What some of
us said about the Hohenzollerns has been put by Colonel Watterson in far
more immortal diction than my poor pen could epitomize it.
[Illustration: Sir Edward Goschen, late British Ambassador in Berlin,
boarding S. S. St. Petersburg, en route to London, August 7th, 1914.]
At Rozendaal, the first station in Holland, there was a wild scramble
from the newspaper coach for the railway telegraph-office. All of us
had reams of "copy" to release, after having been muzzled for five days.
German money, we were distressed to observe, was already at a discount
in the Netherlands, and those of us who did not hand in Dutch or British
gold had to put our "stuff" on the wire after more fortunate colleagues
had beaten us to it with legal tender. A couple of hours later found us
at Amsterdam, where representatives of the British Legation at The Hague
and the local Consulate-General were on hand to greet Sir Edward
Goschen's party and furnish us with the first news of actual war
operations which we had had. Fighting at sea had begun. England had
drawn first blood. The German mine-layer _Konigin Luise_, within
eighteen hours of the declaration of hostilities, _i.e._, on Wednesday,
August 5, was overtaken by the British destroyer _Lance_ and sunk in six
minutes. There was reason to fear that a fleet of enemy mine-layers,
masquerading as fishing-boats and in other pacific disguises, had been
occupied for the better part of a week strewing mines through an area
reaching from a point off Harwich--which we were soon to approach--along
the east coast far up into Scottish waters. On the next day, Thursday,
August 6, the British light cruiser _Amphion_ struck a mine planted by
the _Konigin Luise_ and went down with heavy loss of life. Much more
cheering was the news that gallant Belgium was giving the Germans a
welcome they had not bargained for. The Meuse was being gloriously
defended. Liege was menaced, but still untaken. Germans had been mown
down by the regiment--if reports could be believed--and we devoured them
eagerly. No news is ever so welcome as that which one longs to
hear--even before it is confirmed.
The Hook was ready for us, we were told. The Great Eastern steamer _St.
Petersburg_ was there awaiting our arrival, having the night before
landed Prince Lichnowsky and the other members of the German Embassy in
London. The Kaiser's emissary had passed to the ship through a British
guard of honor, while shore batteries fired an ambassador's salute. How
like Sir Edward Goschen's slinking departure from Berlin, we thought!
Shortly after two o'clock the _St. Petersburg_ lifted anchor and amid
typical North Sea weather, raw, rainy and misty, got under way. Few
thought of German submarines at that time, but the Berlin Government, we
pondered, had not guaranteed Sir Edward Goschen "safe conduct" through
an indiscriminately sown field of floating mines. Quite obviously, we
had now to pass through a zone bristling with uncertainty, to put it
mildly. But we had not steamed far into the open sea before the sight
of a British torpedo-boat flotilla on patrol convinced us that we were
in a well-shepherded course. Then we had our first ocular demonstration
of Jellicoe's unremitting vigilance, for the crescent of destroyers far
forward now began rapidly to close in upon us. Our identity was
apparently not known to them, and they were taking no chances. "They
sent a shot across our bow yesterday, with the Germans on board,"
explained the skipper of the _St. Petersburg_ to Captain Henderson, the
Naval Attache, who was with him on the bridge. Captain Henderson was
not disturbed by the possibility of our getting an innocuous
three-pounder in our wireless rigging or some other harmless token of
the destroyers' solicitude, but he _was_ concerned lest so innocent a
craft should cause British destroyer captains to burn up valuable oil
fuel needlessly at such an hour. So the next I saw of Henderson he was
wig-wagging mysterious messages with signal-flags from the bridge of the
_St. Petersburg_, which told the destroyers, I suppose, that we weren't
in the slightest respect worthy of their attention or shell. They
wig-wagged something back which must have pleased Henderson, for
presently he clambered down smilingly from the upper regions, and said:
"_That's_ all right!"
Harwich hove into view at what should have been sundown. By six o'clock
we were at the pier, boarded by the naval authorities of the port and
the customs-men. Sir Edward Goschen's party, after the Ambassador
himself had vouched for the identity of each and every one of us, was
disembarked without formalities, and at six-forty-five P.M. of Friday,
August 7, we found ourselves treading British soil. There were
policemen, soldiers, reporters and photographers on the dock, but no
formal welcoming delegation for the Ambassador. Somebody whispered to
him that a special train would convey him and his refugees to London,
and to it he took his way as undemonstratively as if he were a Cook's
tourist back from a "tripper's" jaunt to the Continent. I remarked to
Tower that I was afraid Americans would have made a real fuss over
Goschen if he were _our_ Ambassador home from the enemy's country;
whereupon _The Daily News_ man ejaculated something which was to ring in
my ears for a year or more, whenever I presumed to comment on that
strange phenomenon with which it is now my task to deal--England and the
English in war-time: "Wile, you Americans can not understand the English
character." Tower was right.
An American is general manager of the Great Eastern Railway. I strongly
suspect that he must have had an alien hand in even the semblance of a
"demonstration" of greeting which Sir Edward Goschen encountered when
our train pulled into Liverpool Street Station a little after eleven
o'clock. I did not wait to watch it, nor even to claim my baggage, for
there was a hungry first edition waiting for my "story" at _The Daily
Mail_ office, and to Carmelite House I flew in the first taxi into which
I could leap. By midnight Beattie, the night editor, was tearing "copy"
from my hands as fast as an Underwood could reel it off, and it was
rapidly approaching breakfast-time when I called it a night's work and
went to bed--in England at last.