PRO-ALLY UNCLE SAM
Somewhere in E. W. Hornung's _Raffles_, there is this homely bit of
epigrammatic philosophy:
"Money lost, little lost. Honor lost, much lost. Pluckiest, all lost!"
The aphorism was paraphrased by my fellow war refugees in the
_Campania_, tucked away in couples, trios, quintettes and baker's dozens
into cabins which the Cunarder's designers back in the dim mid-Victorian
past built for a half or a third as many passengers.
They made it read like this:
"Baggage lost, all lost!"
Now and then some particularly sentimental soul would spare a
humanitarian thought for the minor horrors of the calamity which had
fallen upon Europe and civilization. But his heart would not throb for
long when somebody would break in upon his maudlin reflections with a
really harrowing tale of trunks left behind in Berlin, Hamburg or
Cologne, in Carlsbad, Lucerne or Ostend, at the Gare du Nord in Paris,
or the quayside in Boulogne or Calais; or of suit-cases and
"innovations" lost, strayed or stolen in the maelstrom of military
traffic in Germany, Belgium or France; or of Packards, Peerlesses,
Studebakers or Overlands summarily abandoned somewhere in the war zone.
What were Europe's travails to these genuine disasters? It was all
right for the war-mad Continent to deck itself in battle-paint if
sanguinarily inclined, but ruthlessly and without notice to break up
Americans' traveling plans, knock Cook tours into a cocked hat,
interrupt "cures," and on top of that, if you please, actually to play
ducks and drakes with the personal effects of free-born American
citizens--all because, forsooth, eight or ten million troops required
the right of way and insisted upon getting it--that was manifestly the
last word in inconsiderateness. Incidentally, of course, it denoted how
hopelessly inefficient Europe was, anyway, in the presence of a sudden
emergency. Why, the general manager of a cross-town transfer company in
New York would have tackled the job without turning a hair. Bah! It
served Americans right--quoth a promenade-deck psychologist. Year in
and year out they'd been lavishing "good United States dollars" on
Europe, and this was her gratitude to her best paying guests. There was
no dissent from the view, which prevailed from rudder to bow, that it
was the ragged edge of what Bostonians call "the limit." "See America
first!" ceasing to be mere admonition, was burnt there and then into the
hearts of our baggage-bereft ship's company with all the force of a
fervid national aspiration. "Never again!" was the way my Chicago
millionairess deck-chair neighbor, who looted the Rue de la Paix
annually, sententiously epitomized not only her aggrieved sentiments,
but those of nearly everybody else. All swore a virtuous vow henceforth
to practise the stay-at-home habit and for the rest of eternity let
man-killing Europe wallow in its savagery.
The story of the exodus which the Second Book of Moses records will
probably outlive the flight of the children of Columbia across the
Atlantic in the summer of 1914. But that hegira will outrank its
Egyptian prototype in one gleaming respect--its atmosphere of
indomitable good humor, once the Campanians surmounted the initial stage
of "grouch," groaning and gnashing of teeth.
Bank presidents and college professors willing to be buffeted across the
ocean in the steerage; society women who bunked contentedly on sofas in
the "ladies' saloon" of the stuffy second cabin; Pittsburgh plutocrats
game enough to sleep six in a stateroom built for four; pampered folk
with French _chefs_ at home, who sat uncomplainingly through the
interminable and usually refrigerated "second serving" in the
_Campania's_ old-fashioned dining-room; corporation lawyers with incomes
the size of a King's civil list, who considered themselves lucky to have
captured the hammocks of the fourth engineer or the hospital attendant
in the odoriferous hold; all these compatriots, grinning and bearing,
proved that after all we are the most adaptable people on earth. After
each and all of us had exchanged tales of woe--everybody had one, even
Doctor Ella Flagg Young, the septuagenarian Superintendent of Chicago's
public schools, who was chased out of the war-zone across Scandinavia
into England--and swapped stories of arrest or less thrilling
inconveniences, and abused the incompetent authorities of the
belligerent governments to our hearts' content, with a slap now and
then, to vary the monotony, at our own United States--the _Campania's_
passengers soon shook down to what turned out to be as jolly a crossing
as any of us, I dare say, ever had. Between thrills about imaginary
"German cruisers" and equally fantastic "rumbling of naval artillery,"
and our amusing discomforts, the week passed almost before we knew it,
and more quickly than some of us even wished. There was, of course, that
irrepressible Illinois State Senator who circulated a petition to
"censure" the Cunard line for not sending us all home in the
_Aquitania_, even though the British Government had requisitioned her
for transport work; but a much more popular note was struck by my young
friend, Miss Marjorie Rice, a typical New York belle, who collected a
couple of hundred dollars with which to present Captain Anderson with a
souvenir of our gratitude for having so gallantly brought us through
invisible dangers. German cruisers were still roaming in the Atlantic,
and, though we traveled at night with masked lights and took various
other precautions like an occasional zigzag course, one never could
tell, though I think most of us banished all thought of peril once we
heard that British ironclads were keeping a lane of safety for Uncle
Sam's fretting sons and daughters all the way from Fastnet to the Fire
Island lightship. Asked by the ship's officers to tell "How the Germans
Went to War" at the last-night-out concert, to which the Cunard Line
with British reverence for tradition still religiously adheres, I could
confidently interpret the sentiment of every American aboard in voicing
deep thankfulness for the fact that Britannia ruled the waves. Going
back with us to the United States was a batch of three or four young
Germans, evidently of university education, because their jowls were
embellished with saber-cuts. They had been stopped in England on their
way home to fight, but were graciously permitted to return whence they
came. Timorous friends beseeched me to beware of "saying too much" about
the Germans in the hearing of these would-be soldiers of the Kaiser; but
I escaped molestation and even heard next day that I had been "most
fair."
Not till many days after we landed in New York did I know that two very
eminent representatives of Allied Powers were sandwiched among the
_Campania's_ home-fleeing American passengers--Sir Cecil Spring-Rice,
British Ambassador at Washington, and his colleague of France, the
cultured Monsieur Jusserand. They had crossed in impenetrable incognito.
Not only were their names missing from the passenger-list, but if they
had ever promenaded or eaten or smoked, they must have done it in
solitary enjoyment of their own exclusive society, as nobody during
seven whole days and nights ever heard of them or saw them, or, what is
vastly more miraculous aboard-ship, ever even talked about them.
American newspapermen afloat in a liner like to flatter themselves that
nothing with even the remotest odor of news ever escapes their
insatiable quest. I had myself bored with strenuous pertinacity into
every news-well in the _Campania_, and there were many. But Spring-Rice
and Jusserand eluded me as thoroughly as if they had been contraband
stored away in the hold, or stokers who only come to life out of the
black hole of Calcutta once or twice a trip, when everybody with a white
face is tight asleep. Bernstorff came in two days later like a brass
band. The British and French Ambassadors broke into the United States,
apparently, in felt-slippers through a back door on a dark night. The
manner of the respective arrivals of the German and the Allied
Ambassadors was to be characteristic of their conduct in the country
throughout the war.
On Monday, August 24, I was lunching at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
Bernstorff had landed that forenoon in the Dutch liner, _Noordam_. To
my astonishment, the Ambassador, whom I had noticed lunching a few
tables away with James Speyer, arose and advanced across the restaurant
to where I was sitting. Bernstorff and I were old acquaintances. I
liked him. Most newspapermen did. Through long residence in Washington,
he had acquired an almost Rooseveltian art in dealing with us. I used
to see him regularly during his periodical official visits to Berlin,
having known him professionally from the days he was Councillor of the
German Embassy in London during the Boer War. Few Americans are aware
that Count Bernstorff was born in England while his father was serving
as Prussian Minister to the Court of St. James. History was destined to
repeat itself in the case of the son, who not only adopted the career of
his father, but when he became an ambassador to a neutral country during
one of Germany's wars was called upon to occupy himself just as the
elder Count Bernstorff had done in London in 1870-71. The father put in
most of his time in England in a vain endeavor to persuade Queen
Victoria's Government to place an embargo on shipment of British arms
and ammunition to the French. He failed as lamentably in that effort as
his son and heir was destined to do in the United States under almost
identical circumstances forty-four years later.
Smiling his most persuasive diplomatic grimace, Count Bernstorff went
straight to the object of his luncheon-table call on me.
"Wile," he began, "you've gone back on us! I can see your hand at work
in the attitude the _New York Times_ has taken up."
I could not imagine at what the genial Count was driving. Perhaps he
had read in the preceding day's _Times_ my long account of the
beginnings of the war as I observed them in Berlin, or my introduction
to _The Times'_ exclusive publication of the German White Paper, printed
that day.
"Your Excellency flatters me," I ventured to rejoin. "I have only been
in the country since Saturday night, and my activities at _The Times_
office have been limited to the very prosaic duty of handing in several
wads of 'copy' written aboard-ship."
But Bernstorff knew better. I had poisoned the atmosphere of Times
Square against Germany's holy cause. He insisted upon thrusting upon me
some occult influence over Mr. Ochs, _The Times'_ able proprietor, and
Mr. Miller, its brilliant editor, and said he was going to see somebody
or other at _The Times_ later in the day and "fix things up." Judging
by the rivers of interviews which thenceforth flowed in an unceasing
torrent from the Ambassador's headquarters in the Ritz-Carlton, he must
have seen not only some _Times_ men, but nearly all the journalists in
Greater New York. How satisfactorily he "fixed things up" with the
great newspaper which has proved to be the Allies' most consistent and
effective supporter in the United States could be judged from next
morning's edition, which was about as anti-Bernstorffian as could be
imagined. The Imperial German Press-Agent's palaver about his ability
to "fix things up" was bombast, pure and unalloyed. There was never the
slightest possibility that he could "fix" anything in the _New York
Times_ office or in any American newspaper office where self-respect,
journalistic honor and rugged independence are enthroned. There are
American newspapers which lay no claim to these virtues, and their names
are undoubtedly, and long have been, carefully card-indexed at 1435
Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C. Some of their owners have
decorations bestowed by the Kaiser.
It proved to be a rare stroke of Fate which took me to the Ritz-Carlton,
for I was destined to be an eyewitness of the assemblage of the Kaiser's
Great General Staff for the Germanization of American public opinion on
the war. Doctor Dernburg had arrived in the _Noordam_ with Count
Bernstorff, and along with them came Captain Boy-Ed, the Naval Attache
at Washington. I knew personally, from Berlin days, both the
ex-Colonial Secretary and the sailor. Dernburg, before he was
pitchforked into Government office from the comparatively humble station
of a bank director in 1906, was the most approachable of men. His
command of the American language was remarkable--an inheritance from his
youth, part of which was spent as a volunteer clerk in a Wall Street
bank. I never forgot my first call on him in Germany. I assumed him to
be a Jew, as his father was. Some Semitic question of public interest
was the news of the moment, and I regarded Dernburg an ideal man to
interview. With a smile I recall how, insistently disavowing his
origin, he told me I had come to "the wrong address." Later I watched
his tempestuous career as administrator of the barren sand-wastes known
as German colonies, saw him give electioneering in the Fatherland a new
phase with his shirt-sleeves campaigning methods, and observed his
meteoric rise to Imperial grace and political power, so soon to be
followed by his equally precipitate fall from those dizzy heights.
Dernburg's lack of manners and tact was commonly said in Berlin to have
led to his official demise after less than four years of Cabinet glory.
No one ever questioned his eminent ability. But his reputation as a
banker rested on cold-blooded ruthlessness, and when he attempted to
carry those methods into a bureaucratic government department, he struck
snags which wrecked his bark. Neither he nor I supposed on August 24,
1914, when we chatted in the palm-court of the Ritz-Carlton, that his
attempt to transplant Berlin ruthlessness into the United States would
eventually prove his undoing there, too.
Captain Boy-Ed, as subsequent history was also to show, was bent on
practising in America the tactics which won him renown and promotion in
Germany. Prior to coming to Washington as Count Bernstorff's Naval
Attache--the Kaiser had decided that the United States navy was
attaining dimensions which required watching by a shrewd observer--the
captain was von Tirpitz' right-hand man at the Imperial Admiralty in
Berlin. He had charge of the so-called News Division, nominally
entrusted with the duty of informing the German public of "routine naval
intelligence, such as accidents, transfers of ships and officers, etc.,
etc.," as I once heard von Tirpitz persuasively and naively describe the
functions of the _Nachrichten-Abteilung_ during a periodical plea to the
Reichstag for more dreadnoughts. Boy-Ed, the son of a Turkish father
and a German mother, devoted himself chiefly in the years between 1906
and 1912 to conducting von Tirpitz' astute propaganda for naval
expansion. It was the era in which the Kaiser's fleet was being
converted by leaps and bounds from a navy of obsolete
thirteen-thousand-ton ships of the _Deutschland_ and _Braunschweig_
class into an armada of dreadnoughts and battle cruisers of the
eighteen-thousand to twenty-four-thousand-ton "all-big-gun"
_Ost-Friesland_ and _Seydlitz_ class. German public opinion required to
be carefully manipulated in order to secure parliamentary sanction for
"supplementary" appropriations which rose by stealthy degrees from
$60,000,000 to $115,000,000 a year. Boy-Ed was assigned the responsible
duty of organizing and carrying out the necessary campaign of education,
and right well and thoroughly he did it. The shoals of pamphlets,
books, newspaper-articles, public-lectures, Navy League speeches and
other "educational" matter with which the Fatherland was flooded--always
with "England, the Foe" as the _leitmotif_,--were to a large extent the
child of Boy-Ed's resourceful brain. He did not write them all, of
course, but he was their inspirer-in-chief. I account him one of the
real creators of the modern German navy, second only to von Tirpitz
himself. It was "the chief's" idea, but Boy-Ed made its materialization
a practical possibility.
Knowing his methods, no revelations of his pernicious activities in the
United States ever surprised me. He was only up to his old tricks,
altering them to suit the American climate and character, but adhering
always to certain basic principles which had stood him in such good
stead in the Fatherland. It would be ungrateful of me not to
acknowledge numerous professional courtesies received at Boy-Ed's hands
when he was misleading the press of Germany and the world at the
News-Division in Leipziger-Platz, Berlin. He nearly had me arrested at
the Imperial dockyard in Wilhelmshaven in March, 1907, for gaining
access, despite thoroughgoing preventive measures, to the launch of
Germany's first dreadnought, the _Nassau_, but during his career at the
Admiralty he more than made up for that by enabling me, in the columns
of _The Daily Mail_, to be the medium of a formal discussion between von
Tirpitz and the British naval authorities on the endlessly controversial
question of Anglo-German sea rivalry. For the best "copy" it was ever
my good fortune to send across the North Sea, my unwithering gratitude
is due and is hereby expressed to the shifty chieftain of Germany's
war-time "intelligence service" in the United States.
Who else besides Bernstorff, Dernburg, Boy-Ed and Speyer attended the
opening council of war of the German field-marshals in the United States
that broiling August day at the Ritz-Carlton, I never learned with
certainty. Dernburg assured me that as far as he was concerned, purely
humanitarian business had brought him to our generous shores; he had
come to collect funds for the German Red Cross, and he once wrote me a
letter on paper emblazoned with that worthy organization's innocuous
trade-mark. I suspect that before the day was over, Professor
Muensterberg of Harvard, Poet Viereck of _The Fatherland_, and Herman
Ridder paid their respects to the propaganda-chieftains, and received
their orders; and probably Julius P. Mayer, the New York manager of the
Hamburg-American Line, and Claussen, his expert "publicity manager,"
left their cards, too. Evidently James Speyer thought his sequestered
and palatial home at Rhinebeck-on-the-Hudson, far from the madding
sleuths of the New York press, was a more ideal retreat for so momentous
a pow-wow, for it was to that idyllic refuge that Count Bernstorff told
me he was immediately repairing. Purely diplomatic affairs at
Washington could obviously wait on the more transcendent business the
Imperial German Ambassador now had in hand; and before he quit the banks
of the Hudson for the shores of the Potomac, the Fatherland's marvelous
attack on the natural sympathies of the American Republic in the great
war was launched with all the force, skill and impudence of a German
assault on the frontier of a foe.
New York was clearly more feverishly interested in the war than London.
Nowhere in Fleet Street had I seen such vibrant throngs in front of
newspaper-offices, as stood eager and transfixed by day and far into the
night in Times and Herald Squares, Columbus Circle and Park Row.
America might have been in the fray herself, to judge by the one
absorbing topic which dominated men and women's talk and obsessed their
thoughts. Detached as we were, it was unmistakable that Europe's agony
had eaten deep into our souls, for even the baseball bulletin-boards
were now deserted in favor of those which were telling in breathless
telegrams of the German cannon-ball plunge through Belgium toward the
fatal Marne and of Russia's seemingly irresistible advance into East
Prussia. I had heard no Englishman arguing about the issues of
Armageddon or the kaleidoscopic events of the battlefield with half the
flaming ardor of those Broadway war experts. In fact there were no
blackboards at all around which the British could hold curbstone
parliaments, for Lord Kitchener's censorship was not parting with news
enough, apparently, to make even the chalk worth while. In London I had
observed the inexplicable phenomenon that at the moment when hell had
broken loose for the British Empire, great journals, instead of deluging
the public with news, actually reduced their ordinary size in some cases
to four pages, though I believe that fear of a print-paper famine and
disappearance of advertising had something to do with those atrophied
dimensions. All in all, however, there was no doubt that isolated
neutral America was excited about the war to a degree which reduced
British interest almost to nonchalance by comparison.
Though I tarried in the East but forty-eight hours, I was conscious of
breathing almost exclusively pro-Ally air. President Wilson's
neutrality proclamation was being respected in letter, as far as
restraining our people from actual breaches in favor of either
belligerent group was concerned, but every minute of the day,
everywhere, it was being vociferously violated in spirit. Before the
war was a month old, Americans already were confessing freely that they
were so "neutral" that they didn't care who won as long as Germany was
"licked." They resigned themselves to the Chief Magistrate's dictum
that the country as such must be guilty of no "un-neutral" acts, but it
failed lamentably to still the natural instincts of American hearts
which were beating fervently, irresistibly, for the Allies.
Bernstorff's hour-by-hour interviews, apologies and explanations,
Muensterberg's homilies, _The Fatherland's_ vituperations, the
_New-Yorker Staatszeitung's_ editorials in English signed by Ridder and
"boiler-plated" to any newspapers which would give them space, "fair
play" appeals from obsequious ex-Berlin exchange-professors like Dean
Burgess of Columbia--all these things fell on deaf ears. None of them
could obliterate the crime of Germany, which loomed ineradicable on the
war horizon as Americans scanned it--Belgium. All the instincts of
American justice, liberty, humanity and regard for treaty obligations
rebelled against "Necessity-knows-no-law" and "scrap of paper" ethics.
We had gone to war ourselves, in 1898, to defend the rights of a small
nation. The spectacle of Military Germany trampling little Belgium under
foot, causelessly, mercilessly, was enough, had there been no other
single issue to enlist our sympathy, to vouchsafe it, whole-heartedly,
to the nations which were leagued in support of the old-fashioned
principle that Right is nobler than Might. Thus was America's mind
attuned in August, 1914, and at least in the opinion-molding area of the
country which lies between the seaboard and the line where the Middle
West begins, that mind was, with American predilection for reaching
right conclusions spontaneously, irrevocably made up. The attempts of
the Propaganda Steam-Roller to flatten out the anti-German prejudices
provoked by the rape of Belgium were frantic, but fruitless. The
pre-digested baby food which pedagogues and demagogues, ambassadors,
brewers and rabbis now began to ladle out for American consumption did
not temper those prejudices. Indeed, it was manifest that it was but
aggravating them. Our own General Brooke, attending the German army
maneuvers in Silesia eight or nine years ago, was asked by the Kaiser if
he had ever been in Germany before. "Never in this part," remarked
Brooke. "Where, then?" persisted William II. "In Cincinnati, Chicago
and Milwaukee," replied the general. I was about to enter "that part"
of Germany now. I was not there long before realizing that pro-Ally
sentiment was immeasurably less assertive, at any rate, than in the
outspokenly pro-Ally East. Chicago, of course, has more Germans than
Duesseldorf, and Cincinnati and Milwaukee, in spots, are as Teutonic as
Hamburg or Bremen, so it was natural to find _Deutschland, Deutschland
ueber Alles_ more than disputing supremacy with _Rule Britannia_. In
Chicago pro-Germanism was rampant and articulate. An article written by
me for the _Chicago Tribune_ in the first fortnight of September, in
which I ventured to express my opinion as to where the responsibility
for the war lay, how long it would last and who would win it, brought
down on me as violent a torrent of abuse as if it had been published in
the _Berliner Tageblatt_. For saying that, in my judgment, the German
War Party had made the war; that it would go on till Germany was beaten
to her knees, and that eventual exhaustion of the Germanic Powers and
the longer resources of the Allies would win the war for the latter, I
became forthwith the target of all the forty-two-centimeter guns in the
Windy City.