COMPLACENCY RULES THE WAVES
More than once during the last phase of our exciting journey to England,
across the mine-strewn waters between the Hook and Harwich, I reflected
that I seemed doomed to take up my residence on British soil in
war-time. It was in the spring of 1900, in the anxious days between
Ladysmith and Mafeking, when the tide of victory was still running in
favor of the Boers, that I first arrived in London, and my lot was cast
there for the succeeding year and a half of the South African struggle.
I felt certain that the feverish interest with which even the sluggish
British temperament had followed every detail of a campaign ten thousand
miles away, and which engrossed only a fraction of the Empire's
strength, would pale into tepid insignificance compared to the concern
which would be generated by a tremendous European war only a
channel-crossing distant. But I had time for only one breakfast and one
morning's papers before I realized that John Bull had donned, even for
Armageddon, the garment in which his bosom swells the proudest--the
armor of invincible inexcitability.
Actually the only wrought-up people in the British Isles during the
first week of the war appeared to be the frantic American tourist
refugees, who, of course, heavily outnumbered their brothers and sisters
in wretchedness whom I had left behind in Germany. If it had not been
for the frantic transatlantic sob and worry fraternity storming the
steamship and express companies' offices in Cockspur Street and the
Haymarket on the morning of Saturday, August 8, when I went out to look
for the war in London, no one could possibly have made me believe that
such a thing existed. Such portions of the community as had not started
for the links, the ocean, the river or the country "as usual" were
demeaning themselves as self-respecting, imperturbable Britons
customarily do on the edge of a "week-end." The seaside holiday season
was at its zenith. The immortal "Twelfth," when grouse-shooting begins,
was approaching. Everybody who was anybody was "out of town," and
stayed there. It was only those fussy, fretting Americans who insisted
upon losing their equilibrium and converting the most placid metropolis
in the universe into a bedlam of unseemly agitation and alarm. It was
"extraordinary," Englishmen said, how they resolutely declined to take a
lesson from the composite stolidity of Britain, preferring to give their
emotions unrestrained rein and to keep the cables hot in imperious
demands for ships, gold and other panaceas for the scared and stranded.
Which reminds me to say that traditional British hospitality to the
stranger within the gate was never showered more graciously on American
friends than in that trying hour.
The British had worried a whole week about the war already. That was a
departure and a concession of no mean magnitude, for it is their boast
and pride that they _never_ "worry." Having, however, yielded to such
un-British instincts in the earliest hours of the crisis, they pulled
themselves together and swore a solemn resolve, come what may, not soon
again to succumb to indecorous habits which the world associated
exclusively with the explosive French or the irresponsibly impulsive
"Yankees." I felt instinctively that an effectual rebuke was being
administered to me personally by the writer of the following newspaper
review of London after three days of war:
"A new metal has come into the London crowd out of the crucible of these
last few days. The froth and fume of flag-wagging have evaporated; so,
too, have lifted bone-quaking mists of dread and suspense. Exultation
and depression are alike unhealthy. It is good that we are now free
from them.
"The faces in the street are the barometers of the souls that men hide.
It does one's heart good to walk London and to behold that very notable
rise--apparent to every one and swift in its example--of the mercury of
the people. The great war took all our comprehensions unawares.
Although it has boded for years, it walked at last like an unbelievable
spectre into a warm and lighted room. What wonder that we were shaken?
What wonder at a creeping ague of the spirit in front of the unknown?
"The dizziness has gone. The trial before us, black as it is, is not so
black as our anticipation of it. We have already surprised ourselves no
less than we have confounded our enemies by our rally and our readiness.
The financial situation is saved, the banks re-open, the food supplies
are safeguarded, and prices controlled.
"A tremendous accession of calmness and reliance has come to the nation
by the appointment of Lord Kitchener to the War Office. The news that
the Army is in his hands, a rock of a man, has swept through London like
a vivifying breeze.
"London is swinging back to as much of its normal life as possible. She
has found herself. She is bravely being the usual London--the great
city serene."
Far more profitable, obviously, than hunting war excitement was
examination of the causes which accounted for its absence, and to that I
forthwith devoted myself. In the first place, there was the navy,
"England's All in All." By a fortuitous circumstance, for which, with
all his faults, the Empire must render imperishable gratitude to its
young half-American First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, the
Fleet was instantly at its "war stations," fully mobilized, and in a
state of battle-readiness and general efficiency unparalleled in British
history. War maneuvers on an unapproached scale had been in progress
for the preceding fortnight or three weeks. Only the merest word of
command was wanting to convert the Grand Fleet into the battering-ram
and shield, to constitute which in the hour of emergency it had been
created. "Ringed by her leaden seas," which were held, moreover, by a
"supreme" armada, there seemed every justification for equanimity, for
the United Kingdom has no frontiers which an invading army can violate
as long as Britannia rules the waves.
The domestic political situation, more menacingly turbulent than at any
time within the memory of living Englishmen, had been resolved with
miraculous rapidity and completeness. "Revolution" in Ulster, on which
the Germans had so fondly banked, vanished as effectually as if it had
never raised its head. "We will ourselves defend the coasts of
Ireland," declared John Redmond in the House of Commons in a speech
which will never die, "and I say to the Government that they may
to-morrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland." Mrs.
Pankhurst, freshly released from a periodical hunger-striking sojourn in
Brixton jail, announced that the suffragettes had stacked arms and now
knew only womankind's duty to England. That sent another Berlin dream
careening into oblivion. "His Majesty's Loyal Opposition" proclaimed in
Parliament through the mouth of the Conservative leader, Bonar Law, that
the Government's political opponents were prepared to accord it
"unhesitating support." In the Government itself the "Potsdam Party,"
as that relentless iconoclast, Leo Maxse, long termed the coterie which
was for peace with Germany at almost any price, was either weeded out or
suppressed. Lord Morley, the Lord President of the Council; "Honest
John" Burns, still true to convictions, President of the Local
Government Board, and Charles P. Trevelyan, Parliamentary Secretary of
the Board of Education, unobtrusively retired from Mr. Asquith's
official family in consequence of their inability to sanction the war.
They have played their parts meantime with honorable consistency--by
maintaining an hermetical silence on questions of the war. And finally,
though primarily in popular judgment, Lord Haldane, the graduate of
Goettingen, the translator of Schopenhauer and the admirer of German
_Geist_, was driven by scandalized public opinion from the War Office,
whither he had just come as an "assistant" to the Prime Minister, whose
cabinet portfolio was the Secretaryship for War. Most of England sighed
with thankful relief when the able Scotch lawyer and philosopher whom
contemporary history accuses of responsibility for Britain's military
unpreparedness, beat an ignominious retreat back to his regular post,
the wool-sack, which, as Lord Chancellor, he by general consent
conspicuously adorned. The country's relief became enthusiastic
assurance when the lawyer, Asquith, himself retired from the War Office,
to make way for the soldier, Kitchener, who was recalled by telegram the
day before from Dover, just as he was about to board ship for Cairo, to
resume his duties as the ruler of Egypt. With the "Potsdam Party"
banished or made harmless, the Cabinet was now regarded as
satisfactorily purged. The public heard with boundless gratification
that the "strong men" of the Government--Grey, Lloyd-George and
Churchill--had been uncompromisingly for war from the start as the only
recourse compatible with British honor, to say nothing of the elementary
dictates of self-preservation. It was at length possible for Mr.
Asquith to assure the country that he presided over an administration of
whose unity of view and determination there was no shadow of a doubt--a
Government which was resolved, as Sir Edward Grey's great speech in the
House of Commons on August 3 set forth, to accomplish three cardinal
purposes:
1. To protect the defenseless French coast against attack by the German
navy;
2. To defend the integrity of Belgium; and
3. To put forth all Britain's strength and not run away from the
obligations of honor and interest.
When the events of the Great War, and perhaps the chief actors in it
themselves, have passed away, some British historian will almost
certainly arise to tell the world the story--the "inside story"--of how
Mr. Asquith's cabinet, through three days and nights of doubts,
uncertainties, trials and tribulations, crossed the Rubicon to the shore
of unanimity on the subject of British participation. There were
moments, beyond all question, when that issue hung perilously in the
balance. The French Government's frantic eleventh-hour appeals for a
decision in Downing Street are mute evidence of the vacillation which
prevailed--a species of tentativeness which has never been missing from
the British conduct of the purely diplomatic affairs of the war. The
ministerial debates during which the die was cast in favor of war will
make immortal reading, even if only a digest of them is all that is
vouchsafed posterity. The "strong men" of the Government, if report is
reliable, were called upon to fight valiantly and ceaselessly to avoid
England's "running away from the obligations of honor and interest."
The tense interval which ensued while they were battering down the
trenches of skepticism, chicken-heartedness and nonchalance among their
Cabinet colleagues caused a delay which might easily have proved of
fatal import; for the decision to throw the strength of the British
army, as well as the navy, into the scales was under discussion, and it
is conceivable that the Expeditionary Force, which it was eventually
determined to send, might have been kept back for weeks, or even
altogether, instead of the mere days its dispatch was actually retarded.
Disaster incalculable would almost inevitably have resulted in that
event.
The indispensable and all-governing preliminary measures for war in
respect of domestic politics, the Government and the naval and military
administration having thus been taken, equally radical precautions were
invoked to put the nation's economic house in order. The Stock
Exchange, following the lead of New York, Paris and Berlin, had shut
down as early as July 31, in order that mere insensate panic on the part
of the speculative and investing world might not degenerate into
irretrievable rout. War having descended with irresistible suddenness
during the "week-end" preceding the traditional August Bank Holiday
(Monday, the 3rd), a meeting of great financiers in the Bank of England
on the holiday itself decided to prolong it, as far as banks and bankers
were concerned, for three days, _i.e._, until Friday, the 7th, in what
turned out to be the well-grounded hope that public excitement would
meantime subside and prevent "runs" ruinous alike to banks and
depositors. A moratorium was established. The Bank discount-rate,
which had already vaulted from four to eight per cent., was now raised
to ten, an unheard-of figure, which effectually curbed the lust of
persons anxious to profit from war abnormalities or otherwise indulge in
operations not consistent with the gravity of the hour.
[Illustration: Germans Anxious to Fly from England. Remarkable scenes
were witnessed outside the American Consulate, thousands of Germans
clamoring for passage back to Germany.]
It was mainly these things--wholesome, substantial proofs that their
rulers had grappled with the situation with bold initiative that
inspired the people of London with reassurance, which, diluted with the
stoicism of the British character, became calm confidence Gibraltar-like
in its inflexibility. She had "the men," England was saying; she had
"the ships," and, Parliament having voted an initial war fund of one
hundred million pounds as unconcernedly as if it were a thousand-pounds
grant for a new switch-track at Woolwich arsenal, she unmistakably had
"the money," too.
But even more self-comforting, if possible, than this iron trust in her
own inexhaustible resources was England's conviction in the
invincibility of her Allies. Was not even little Belgium holding back
the flower of the German army before Liege? Even in the unlikely event
of Liege's fall, would not the impregnable fortress of Namur provide
Krupp guns with a still tougher nut to crack? Those were, alas! the
hours in which the existence of the forty-two-centimeter siege gun was
not even mooted in ostrich England. France? The Germans would find a
vastly different antagonist awaiting them this time in the Ardennes, the
Vosges passes and along the Meuse and the Sambre. There was a "New
France," a France of _elan_ and iron. It was the virile Republic of
Poincare, Delcasse, Joffre, Bleriot, Pegoud and Carpentier, with which
the Prussian hosts must this time measure lances, not the degenerate
Empire of the third Napoleon, which crumbled at Sedan and Metz and
surrendered Paris. Russia? "Can't you just hear the steam-roller
rumbling across East Prussia and thundering at the gates of Berlin?" a
great English peer asked me, in all seriousness, during my first week in
London. "Isn't the tread of the Czar's countless millions, pounding
remorselessly toward the west, almost audible?" he persisted. Millions
of Englishmen were thinking and saying the same thing. As for the
German army, almost as many of them were convinced that that
"over-organized, peace-stale" military establishment, which was a
magnificent spectacle on parade, but lacked leaders experienced in
modern campaigning, would crash to pieces not only against "superior
numbers" but against Allied troops and commanders who had been fighting
great wars this past quarter of a century in Africa and Asia. London's
feelings toward Germany seemed, indeed, almost compassionate. Many
people, otherwise sane, talked about the war being over by Christmas.
The Kaiser's navy would come out and be smashed, they calculated, and
such work as had not already been accomplished by the Allied armies
within the Fatherland's eastern and western frontiers would soon be
completed by "internal collapse," industrial stagnation, national
impoverishment and universal starvation. Poor Germany! She had brought
it on herself. Her end, after a peace soon to be dictated in Berlin,
would manifestly be speedy and annihilating. The Social Democrats, it
was true, were bamboozled into support of the war by fictitious
assurances that the sword had been "forced" into Germany's unwilling and
blameless hand, but the scales would presently fall from their eyes, and
then woe betide whatever remained of the Hohenzollerns' ravished,
defenseless realm! Street-hawkers in the Strand were selling blatant
copies--a penny each--of _The Kaiser's Last Will and Testament_. Would
William II be sent to St. Helena, like the other Napoleon, or be
interned in some more accessible point in the British Empire, to pass
the remaining days of his humiliation and remorse? And the "Crown
Prince" with him, of course. These were the reveries of Britain in the
early days of August, 1914. Nothing disturbed them except the creaking
and the rumbling of the Russian steam-roller. Those being dulcet
reverberations, John Bull paused eagerly in the midst of his musings to
let them lull him into a still deeper siesta of optimism....
Serene and imperturbable as the vast majority of Englishmen were, the
responsible leaders of the nation were under no delusions as to the
magnitude of the task now confronting them. To the country's intense
astonishment, though Lord Roberts had been dinning it in their ears
incessantly for at least five years previous, England found itself in a
state of practical impotence as far as effective participation in modern
large-scale military operations was concerned. In the same five minutes
during which Parliament voted one hundred million pounds as a first war
credit, it also sanctioned an increase of the British army by five
hundred thousand men. At that moment the Home military establishment,
which was immediately mobilized as "The British Army Expeditionary
Force" when England decided to enter the war with her soldiers as well
as her sailors, consisted of eight divisions of all arms--roundly, one
hundred fifty thousand men. An organization of another half-million
troops, officered and equipped for a great Continental campaign, could
not be stamped out of the ground. Its production, even in a country
with the glorious military traditions of England, was manifestly fraught
with stupendous difficulties. There was no mistrust of British
patriotism; but when men recalled the futility of Lord Roberts' efforts
to implant in England's conscience the necessity of some form of
National Service--how he not only failed, but was ridiculed and vilified
for pursuing his sagacious crusade in the face of merciless rebuff--and
when inherent British repugnance to "soldiering" and even to wearing
uniforms was remembered, there were widespread misgivings.
Prussian militarism long filled me with abhorrence. I had learned to
detest it not as an institution, but for its numerous disgusting
manifestations, principally the arrogance of its gilded popinjays and
the brutal and overweening contempt in which their traditions and
training taught them to hold mere civilian microbes. Yet in those
frantic hours when hopelessly unready military England was compelled to
patch up an army for battle against the world's most scientific
war-machine, I pondered what a blessing a little "militarism" would have
been for the British democracy. I had seen Germany trooping off to war,
singing, cheering and flower-garnished; and I knew that her debonair
demeanor was due less to lust for the fray--the great mass of the nation
was animated by no such sentiment as that--than to the realization,
which sprang from immutable facts and numbers, that her citizen army was
equal to almost any emergencies it would be called upon to meet.
Germany was a nation in arms. England was a nation in difficulties.
How grotesquely unprepared to play a commensurate part in a military
war, compared to her Continental allies and foes, this table showing the
size of the various armies indicates:
Peace footing War footing Guns
Great Britain ............... 234,000 380,000 1,000
Austria-Hungary ............. 500,000 2,200,000 2,500
France (including Algeria) .. 790,000 4,000,000 4,200
Germany ..................... 850,000 6,000,000 5,500
Russia ...................... 1,700,000 7,000,000 6,000
Lord Kitchener was obviously the man of the hour. An organizer
primarily, rather than a strategist, tactician or field-marshal, his
appointment to the War Secretaryship demonstrated that whoever was
responsible for it--men say it was Lord Northcliffe--recognized
instantly the all-overshadowing requirement: a recruiting sergeant.
Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief, would necessarily retain the
supreme direction of the Allied forces operating against the German
front in France and Belgium. England's part was to send him men. And
the one to find, drill and equip them was unmistakably Kitchener of
Khartum, South Africa, India and Egypt, the "organizer" of victory
against the fuzzy-wuzzies and the Boers, the disciplinarian who had
galvanized the Indian army into new life, and the administrator who was
licking Egypt into Imperial shape. There would be time enough for the
war itself to produce another Wellington or Roberts. What was needed now
was men, rifles and guns, cartridges, shells and uniforms, war-planes,
motor-lorries and hospital-trains and all the other innumerable
impedimenta of modern man-killing. The summoning to the task of the big
bluff soldier who first saw the light in County Kerry, who was looked
upon as the incarnation of initiative and relentless efficiency, and who
had proved his right so to be considered, was elementary and inevitable.
It was work for a "sergeant-major" and a "drill-sergeant" rather than
for a Napoleonic genius; and when England learned that "K.," as he is
affectionately known in the army, was on the prodigious job, England
took heart. She responded with a will to his first appeal for men. The
hoardings of the Kingdom were plastered with it on the morning of August
8. It read as follows:
+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| YOUR KING AND COUNTRY |
| NEED YOU. |
| |
| A CALL TO ARMS |
| |
| An addition of 100,000 men to his Majesty's Regular Army |
| is immediately necessary in the present grave National |
| Emergency. |
| |
| Lord Kitchener is confident that this appeal will be at once |
| responded to by all those who have the safety of our |
| Empire at heart. |
| |
| TERMS OF SERVICE |
| |
| General Service for a period of 3 years or until the war is |
| concluded. |
| |
| Age of Enlistment between 19 and 30. |
| |
| HOW TO JOIN |
| |
| Full information can be obtained at any Post Office in the |
| Kingdom or at any Military depot. |
| |
| GOD SAVE THE KING! |
| |
+------------------------------------------------------------------+
In the past England's volunteer army had been maintained by a recruiting
system which produced, on the average, about thirty-five thousand new
men a year. They did not come easily, even in halcyon peace times, and
the gaily-caparisoned recruiting-sergeant in Trafalgar Square, who would
buttonhole a hundred likely "Tommies" in a day, earned well his fee if
he succeeded in inducing ten of them to "take the shilling." It
remained to be seen if "the present grave National Emergency" would find
dormant in Britain military talent and inclination hitherto undreamt of.
In the opening flush of the excitement and enthusiasm which the war
engendered, Lord Kitchener's hopes were satisfactorily realized.
Recruiting-offices in numerous districts were literally stormed. The
response from the middle, "upper-middle" and upper classes was
particularly buoyant. Duke, peer, aristocrat, nobleman, "nut," banker,
lawyer, doctor, merchant, teacher and clerk came forward splendidly.
But artisan, docker and miner lagged. The lower class revealed an
inclination to continue to throng the public-houses rather than the
recruiting-offices. It seemed evident at the outset that it was not
they who were bent on saving England. They gave disquieting indication
that their sort of patriotism was primarily individual
self-preservation, that for them, love of country began at home. A
waking-up process in their unenlightened ranks was destined to come to
pass, thanks mainly to "separation allowances" for missus and the kids,
but it was never to attain the dimensions of a rousing which extorted
from their atrophied intelligence even an approximate appreciation of
their obligations or their country's peril. Britain's war is being
waged, as it will be won--speaking broadly--by the patriotism and blood
of the excoriated upper ten thousand. The struggle had been in progress
for more than a year, at a cost of nearly five hundred thousand British
casualties, when it was still necessary for Lloyd-George to remind
working-class England, in as unqualified language as a politician dare
speak to the nation's electoral masters, that it was not doing its full
duty.
While Britain at large still hugged the delusion of easy victory, in
grotesque underestimation of the enemy's power, and while Kitchener's
recruit-finding machinery was being put in vigorous motion, the War
Office, in co-operation with the navy, was accomplishing as magnificent
a piece of military work as army annals hold--the silent landing of the
British Expeditionary Force of one hundred and sixty thousand men, with
its full complement of horses, guns and stores, on the shores of France.
That feat will live as immortal disproof of the charge popular in the
United States that "hustle" is a word which is conspicuously missing
from the British lexicon. Compared to it, our "hustle" in landing an
army in Cuba in 1898 was the quintessence of procrastination and muddle.
The British railways had been taken over by the Government coincident
with the arrival of war, an "Executive Committee" consisting of the
General Managers of the main companies having been established more than
a year previous as an advisory council for such an emergency as had now
supervened. Embarkation of the Expeditionary Force commenced on the
night of August 7th. Admiral Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand
Fleet, assured Lord Kitchener that the channel passage was as safe as
the Thames itself. The British public, receiving its first lesson in
relentless censorship of war news, was kept so effectually in the dark
as to the dispatch of the largest army which ever left English shores
that it knew nothing whatever of it till the host was at its
destination, with breasts bared to the foe. The landing of Sir John
French's legions on the soil of France was accomplished, complete in
every detail, by August 17th.
British railways, when the record of that marvel of transportation is
compiled, will share the honors with the ironclads of Britain's navy and
the liners of her mercantile marine. Southampton being the main port of
departure, the performance of the London and Southwestern Railway, which
has carried so many thousand Americans in pacific days from Waterloo
Station to the ship's side, is a case in point. I heard Sir H. A.
Walker, the "Southwestern's" general manager make before the American
Luncheon Club in London the first announcement of the railways' part in
England's military mobilization. With his subsequent permission, I was
privileged to give the British public its first information on that
subject. The L. & S. W. had been assigned the task of making ready for
dispatch to Southampton within sixty hours three hundred and fifty
trains of thirty cars each. It did the trick in forty-five hours.
During the first three weeks of war there were dispatched to and
unloaded at the ships' sides seventy-three of such trains every fourteen
hours. They arrived from the four quarters of the kingdom, and none of
them was late. "I come from the land of 'big railway stunts,'" said
Henry W. Thornton, the American general manager of the Great Eastern
railway when Sir H. A. Walker had told this convincing story of British
"hustle." "We think we are 'pulling off' some feat when we handle
G.A.R. encampments and national conventions, but what British railways
accomplished in the ten days between August 7 and 17 last may fairly be
claimed as a unique record in railway history." What Mr. Thornton
modestly failed to add was that he himself, as a colleague presently
bore testimony, had played a conspicuous role in the drama of British
military mobilization. Certain inanimate things, almost as well known
to Americans as Mr. Thornton, played big parts, too. The palatial
_Mauretania_, with her _suites de-luxe_ battered into cargo-room for
Tommy Atkins, and her big new sister, _Aquitania_, with only a maiden
crossing or two to her credit, similarly knocked to pieces, made
incessant trips back and forth between Southampton and other channel
ports to Dieppe, Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk, landing in France on each
occasion no less than five thousand British fighting-men, ready for
death and glory.
Each mother's son of them carried with him this little personal message
from Lord Kitchener:
"You are ordered abroad as a soldier of the King to help our French
comrades against the invasion of a common enemy. You have to perform a
task which will need your courage, your energy, your patience.
"Remember that the honour of the British army depends on your individual
conduct. It will be your duty, not only to set an example of discipline
and perfect steadiness under fire, but also to maintain the most
friendly relations with those whom you are helping in this struggle.
The operations in which you are engaged will, for the most part, take
place in a friendly country, and you can do your own country no better
service than in showing yourself in France and Belgium in the true
character of a British soldier.
"Be invariably courteous, considerate, and kind. Never do anything
likely to injure or destroy property, and always look upon looting as a
disgraceful act. You are sure to meet with a welcome, and to be
trusted; your conduct must justify that welcome and that trust. Your
duty can not be done unless your health is sound. So keep constantly on
your guard against any excesses. In this new experience you may find
temptations in wine and women. You must entirely resist both
temptations, and, while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you
should avoid any intimacy.
"Do your duty bravely.
"Fear God.
"Honour the King.
"KITCHENER, Field-Marshal."
I remained in England only a week after my arrival from Germany. Part
of the time had been pleasantly spent editing a special "American
edition" of _The Times_ for Lord Northcliffe, who placed the full
machinery of his journalistic organization at the disposal of the
"Yankee War Refugees." He was only prevented from extending them the
hospitality of Sutton Place, his lovely estate in Surrey, now a
hospital, for a "week-end" outing by the inability of the railways to
guarantee the necessary special train facilities. To my astonishment
but unalloyed delight Lord Northcliffe "ordered" me to take a month's
vacation in the United States. He thought my family and kinsmen would
like to have a look at an "English spy," fresh from Germany, before the
earmarks of his nefarious trade had entirely evaporated, and so, having
obtained the last bunk left on that veteran Cunard hulk, _S.S.
Campania_, which had brought my wife and me to Europe on our honeymoon
voyage, I sailed away from Liverpool on Saturday, August 15th, along
with twelve hundred or fifteen hundred other sardines packed in an
eighteen-knot steel box.