LORD KITCHENER VISITS AMERICA AND DISCUSSES OUR MILITARY PROBLEMS
I was standing with Count Zeppelin in the doorway of Mrs. John L.
Gardner’s Fenway palace when the news of the great sea horror reached
Boston. The German submarine U-68, scouting off the coast of Maine,
had sunk the American liner _Manhattan_, the largest passenger vessel
in the world, as she raced toward Bar Harbor with her shipload of
non-combatants. Eighteen hundred and sixty-three men, women, and children
went down with the ship. No warning had been given. No chance had been
offered for women or children or neutral passengers to escape. The
disaster duplicated the wrecking of the _Lusitania_ in 1915, but it
exceeded it in loss of human life. The American captain and all his men
shared the fate of the passengers intrusted to their care.
In Boston the effect on the German officers and men was unbelievable.
Tremont and Boylston and Washington streets, echoing with cheers of the
exulting conquerors, resembled the night of a Harvard-Yale football game
when Brickley used to play for Cambridge University. The citizens of the
big town, their senses deadened by their own disaster, received the news,
and the ghastly celebration that followed it, without any real interest.
The fact that an ex-Mayor of Boston and the son of the present Governor
were among those that perished failed to rouse them. Boston, mentally as
well as physically, was in the grip of the enemy.
That this was just the effect the Germans planned to produce is shown by
General von Kluck’s own words. In an interview that he gave me for the
London _Times_, after the occupation of Boston on July 2, 1921, General
von Kluck said:
“The way to end a war quickly is to make the burden of it oppressive upon
the people. It was on this principle that General Sherman acted in his
march from Atlanta to the sea. It was on this principle that General
Grant acted in his march from Washington to Richmond. Grant said he would
fight it out on those lines if it took all summer--meaning lines of
relentless oppression. In modern war a weak enemy like Belgium or like
New England, which is far weaker than Belgium was in 1914, must be
crushed immediately. Think of the bloodshed that would have stained the
soil of Connecticut and Massachusetts if we had not spread terror before
us. As it is, New England has suffered very little from the German
occupation, and in a very short time everything will be going on as
usual.”
The veteran warrior paused, and added with a laugh: “Better than usual.”
As a matter of fact, within a week Boston had resumed its ordinary life
and activities. Business was good, factories were busy, and the theatres
were crowded nightly, especially Keith’s, where the latest military
photo-play by Thomas Dixon and Charles T. Dazey--with Mary Pickford as
the heroine and Charley Chaplin as the comedy relief--was enjoyed
immensely by German officers.
As to the commerce of Boston Harbor, it was speedily re-established, with
ships of all nations going and coming, undisturbed by the fact that it
was now the German flag on German warships that they saluted.
I received instructions from my paper about this time to leave New
England and join General Wood’s forces, which had crossed the Delaware
into Pennsylvania, where they were battling desperately with von
Hindenburg’s much stronger army. On the day following my arrival at the
American headquarters, I learned that Lord Kitchener had come over from
England to follow the fighting as an eye-witness; and I was fortunate
enough to obtain an interview with his lordship, who remembered me in
connection with his Egyptian campaigns.
“The United States is where England would have been in 1914 without her
fleet,” said Lord Kitchener.
“Where is that?”
“If England had been invaded by a German army in 1914,” replied the great
organiser gravely, “she would have been wiped off the map. It was
England’s fleet that saved her. And, even so, we had a hard time of it.
Everything was lacking--officers, men, uniforms, ammunition, guns,
horses, saddles, horse blankets, everything except our fleet.”
A sudden light burned in Lord Kitchener’s strange eyes, and he added
earnestly: “There is something more than that. In 1914 Germany was
wonderfully prepared in material things, but her greatest advantage over
all other nations, except Japan, lay in her dogged devotion to her own
ideals. She may have been wrong, as we think, but she believed in
herself. There was nothing like it in England, and there is nothing like
it in America. The German masses, to the last man, woman, and child, were
inspired to give all that they had, their lives included, for the Empire.
In England there was more selfishness and self-indulgence. We had labour
troubles, strike troubles, drink troubles; and finally, as you know, in
1916 we were forced to adopt conscription. It will be the same story here
in America.”
“Don’t you think that America will ultimately win?”
Lord Kitchener hesitated.
“I don’t know. Germany holds New York and Boston and is marching on
Philadelphia. Think what that means! New York is the business capital of
the nation. It is hard to conceive of the United States without New
York.”
“The Americans will get New York back, won’t they?”
“How? When? It is true you have a population of eighty millions west of
the Allegheny Mountains, and somehow, some day, their American spirit and
their American genius ought to conquer; but it’s going to be a job.
Patriotism is not enough. Money is not enough. Potential resources are
not enough. It is a question of doing the essential thing before it is
too late. We found that out in England in 1916. If America could have
used her potential resources when the Germans landed on Long Island, she
would have driven her enemies into the sea within a week; but the thing
was not possible. You might as well expect a gold mine in Alaska to stop
a Wall Street panic.”
I found that Lord Kitchener had very definite ideas touching great social
changes that must come in America following this long and exhausting war,
assuming that we finally came out of it victorious.
“America will be a different land after this war,” he said. “You will
have to reckon as never before with the lowly but enlightened millions
who have done the actual fighting. The United States of the future must
be regarded as a vast-co-operative estate to be managed for the benefit
of all who dwell in it, not for the benefit of a privileged few. And
America may well follow the example of Germany, as England has since the
end of the great war in 1919, in using the full power of state to lessen
her present iniquitous extremes of poverty and wealth, which weaken
patriotism, and in compelling a division of the products of toil that is
really fair.
“I warn you that America will escape the gravest labour trouble with the
possibility of actual revolution only by admitting, as England has
admitted, that from now on labour has the whip hand over capital and must
be placated by immense concessions. You must either establish state
control in many industries that are now privately owned and managed and
establish state ownership in all public utilities or you must expect to
see your whole system of government swing definitely toward a socialistic
regime. The day of the multi-millionaire is over.”
I found another distinguished Englishman at General Wood’s headquarters,
Lord Northcliffe, owner of the London _Times_, and I had the unusual
experience of interviewing my own employer for his own newspaper. As
usual, Lord Northcliffe took sharp issue with Lord Kitchener on several
points. His hatred of the Germans was so intense that he could see no
good in them.
“The idea that Germany will be able to carry this invasion of America to
a successful conclusion is preposterous,” he declared. “Prussian
supermen! What are they? Look at their square heads with no backs to them
and their outstanding ears! Gluttons of food! Guzzlers of drink! A race
of bullies who treat their women like squaws and drudges and then cringe
to every policeman and strutting officer who makes them goose-step before
him. Bismarck called them a nation of house-servants, and knew that
in racial aptitude they are and always will be hopelessly inferior to
Anglo-Saxons.
“Conquer America? They can no more do it than they could conquer England.
They can make you suffer, yes, as they made us suffer; they can fill you
with rage and shame to find yourselves utterly unprepared in this hour of
peril, eaten up with commercialism and pacifism just as we were. But
conquer this great nation with its infinite resources and its splendid
racial inheritance--never!
“The Germans despise America just as they despised England. John Bull was
an effete old plutocrat whose sons and daughters were given up to sport
and amusement. The Kaiser, in his famous Aix-la-Chapelle order, referred
scornfully to our ‘contemptible little army.’ He was right, it was a
contemptible little army, but by the end of 1917 we had five million
fully equipped men in the field and in the summer of 1918 the Kaiser saw
his broken armies flung back to the Rhine by these same contemptible
Englishmen and their brave allies. There will be the same marvellous
change here when the tortured American giant stirs from his sleep of
indifference and selfishness. Then the Prussian superman will learn
another lesson!”