Meantime what had been happening among ourselves? The far-off murmur of
the approaching wind had been heard by all of us, but as none can hope
to describe the effect on the whole Empire, perhaps each may be allowed
to indicate the character of the warning as it came to his own ears. It
was at Naples, not long after the event, that I heard how the late King
had felt about his last visit to Berlin. I was then on my way home
from Egypt, where I had spent some days at Mena, while Lord Roberts was
staying there on his way back from the Soudan. He seemed restless and
anxious. On two successive mornings I sat with him for a long hour in
the shade of the terraces which overlook the Pyramids discussing the
“German danger.” After the great soldier had left for Cairo he wrote
asking me to regard our conversations as confidential; and down to this
moment I have always done so, but I see no harm now (quite the reverse
of harm) in repeating the substance of what he said so many years ago on
a matter of such infinite momentousness.
“Do you really attach importance to this scare of a German invasion?” I
asked.
“I’m afraid I do,” said Lord Roberts.
“You think an enemy army could be landed on our shores?”
“As things are now, yes, I think it could.”
“Do you think you could land an army on the East Coast of England and
march on to London?”
“Yes, I do.”
“In a thick fog, of course?” “Without a fog,” said Lord Roberts. After
that he described in detail the measures we ought to take to make such
an attack impossible and I hasten to add that, so far as I can see and
know, the precautionary measures he recommended have all been taken
since the outbreak of the war.
“WE’LL FIGHT AND FIGHT SOON”
By that time I had, in common with the majority of my countrymen who
travelled much abroad, been compelled to recognize the ever-increasing
hostility of the German and British peoples whenever they encountered
each other on the highways of the world--their constant cross-purposes
on steamships, in railway trains, hotels, casinos, post and telegraph
offices--making social intercourse difficult and friendship impossible.
The overbearing manners of many German travellers, their aggressive and
domineering selfishness, which always demanded the best seats, the best
rooms, and the first attention, was year by year becoming more and more
intolerable to the British spirit. It cannot be said that we acquiesced.
Indeed, it must be admitted that our country-people usually met the
German claims to be the supermen of Europe with rather unnecessary
self-assertion. If an unmannerly German pushed before us at the counter
of a booking-office we pushed him back; if he shouted over our shoulders
at a telegraph office we told him to hold his tongue; and if, in
stiflingly hot weather, he insisted (as he often did) on shutting up
again and again the window of a railway carriage after we had opened it
for a breath of air, we sometimes drove our elbow through the glass for
final answer--as I saw an English barrister do one choking day on the
journey between Jaffa and Jerusalem.
These were only the straws that told how the wind blew, but they were
disquieting symptoms nevertheless to such of us as felt, with Professor
Harnack and his colleagues at the Edinburgh Conference, that by blood,
history, and faith the German and British peoples were brothers (ugly
as it sounds to say so now), each more closely bound to the other in the
world-task of civilization than with almost any other nation.
“If we are brothers we’ll fight all the more fiercely for that fact,” we
thought, “and, God help us, we’ll fight soon.”
“HE KNOWS, DOESN’T HE?”
I was staying in a neutral country at an hotel much frequented by the
German governing classes when an English newspaper proprietor, after
a visit to Berlin, published in his most popular journal a map of a
portion of Northern Europe in order to show at sight his view of the
extent of the forthcoming German aggression. The paper was lying open
between a group of gentlemen whose names have since become prominent
in relation to the war when I stepped up to the table. The men were
obviously angry, although laughing immoderately. “Look at that,” said
one of them, pointing to the map and running his finger down the coast
of Holland and Belgium and France to Calais. “_He_ knows, doesn’t he?”
And then, after a general burst of derisive laughter, came a bitter
attack on British journalism (“The scaremongering of that paper is
doing more than anything in the world to make war between Germany and
England”), a still fiercer and more bitter assault on our Lords of the
Admiralty, who had lately proposed a year’s truce in the building of
battleships (“Tell your Mr. Churchill to mind his own business, and
we’ll mind ours”), and, finally, a passionate protest that Germany’s
object in increasing her navy was not to enlarge her empire, but
merely to keep the seas open to her trade. “Why,” said one of the men,
“nine-tenths of my own business is with London, and if England could
shut up our ships I should be a ruined man in a month.” “Quite so,” said
another, “and so far as German people go that’s the beginning and end of
the whole matter.”