My Four Years in Germany Part 24

Both he and his sister, whose charitable work for the British deserves mention, were at one time thrown into jail, charged with spying.

I at first attended the hybrid American church, but when, in 1915, I think, the committee hired a German _woman_ preacher I ceased to attend. The American, the Reverend Dr. Crosser, who was in charge when I arrived in Berlin left, to my everlasting regret, in the spring before the war.

Poor Creelman, the celebrated newspaper correspondent, died in Berlin. We got him in to a good hospital and some one from the Emba.s.sy visited him every day.

The funeral services were conducted in the American Church by the Rev. Dr. d.i.c.kie, long a resident of Berlin, whose wife had presented the library to the American church. The Foreign Office sent Herr Horstmann as its representative.

While to-day all royalties and public men pose for the movies, Czar Ferdinand of Bulgaria and his family are probably the first royalties to act in a cinematograph. In 1916, there was released in Berlin a play in which Czar Ferdinand of Bulgaria, his wife and two daughters by a former wife appeared, acting as Bulgarian royalties in the development of the plot.

The difference between von Jagow and Zimmermann was that von Jagow had lived abroad, had met people from all countries and knew that there was much to learn about the psychology of the inhabitants of countries other than Germany. Zimmermann, in the early part of his career, had been consul at Shanghai; and, on his way back, had pa.s.sed through America, spending two days in San Francisco and three in New York. He seemed to think that this transcontinental trip had given him an intimate knowledge of American character. Von Jagow, on the other hand, almost as soon as war began, spent many hours talking to me about America and borrowed from me books and novels on that country. The novel in which he took the greatest interest was "Turmoil," by Booth Tarkington.

I think there must have been a period quite recently when the German Government tried to imbue the people with a greater degree of frightfulness, because all of us in visiting camps, etc. observed that the _landsturm_ men or older soldiers were much more merciful than the younger ones.

Alexander Cochran, a New York yachtsman, volunteered to become a courier between the London Emba.s.sy and ours. On his first trip, although he had two pa.s.sports (his regular pa.s.sport and a special courier's pa.s.sport), he was arrested and compelled to spend the night on the floor of the guard-room at the frontier town of Bentheim. This ended his aspirations to be a courier. He is now a commander in the British Navy, having joined it with his large steam yacht, the _Warrior_ some time before the United States entered the war. In the piping times of peace he had been the guest of the Emperor at Kiel.

A British prisoner, who escaped from Ruhleben, was caught in a curious manner. Prisoners in Ruhleben received bread from outside, as I have explained in the chapter on prisoners of war. This bread is white, something unknown in Germany since the war. The escaped prisoner took with him some sandwiches made of the bread he had received in Ruhleben and most incautiously ate one of these sandwiches in a railway station. He was immediately surrounded by a crowd of Germans anxious to know where he had obtained the white bread, and, in this way, was detected and returned to prison.

On our way out in September, 1916, we were given a large dinner in Copenhagen by our skilful minister there, the Hon. Maurice F. Egan, who has devoted many years of his life to the task of adding the three beautiful Danish islands to the dominions of the United States. He is an able diplomat, very popular in Copenhagen, where he is dean of the diplomatic corps. At this dinner we met Countess Hegerman-Lindencron, whose interesting books, "The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life" and "The Courts of Memory," have had a large circulation in America. In Copenhagen, too, both on the way out and in, we lunched with Count Rantzau-Brockedorff, then German Minister there. Count Rantzau is skilful and wily, and not at all military in his instincts; and, I should say, far more inclined to arrive at a reasonable compromise than the average German diplomat. He is a charming International, with none of the rough points and aggressive manners which characterise so many Prussian officials.

In judging the German people, we must remember that, while they have made great progress in the last forty years in commerce and chemistry, the very little liberty they possess is a plant of very recent growth. About the year 1780, Frederick the Great having sent some money to restore the burned city of Greiffenberg, in Silesia, the magistrates of that town called upon him to thank him. They kneeled and their spokesman said, "We render unto your Majesty in the name of the inhabitants of Greiffenberg, our humble thanks for the most gracious gift which your Majesty deigned to bestow in aid and to a.s.sist us in rebuilding our homes.

"The grat.i.tude of such dust as we, is, as we are aware, of no moment or value to you. We shall, however, implore G.o.d to grant your Majesty His divine favours in return for your royal bounty."

Too many Germans, to-day, feel that they are mere dust before the almost countless royalties of the German Empire. And these royalties are too p.r.o.ne to feel that the kingdoms, dukedoms and princ.i.p.alities of Germany and their inhabitants are their private property. The Princes of Na.s.sau and Ans.p.a.ch and Hesse, at the time of our Revolution, sold their unfortunate subjects to the British Government to be exported to fight the Americans. Our American soil covers the bones of many a poor German peasant who gave up his life in a war from which he gained nothing.

When Frederick the Great, the model and exemplar of all German royalties; died in 1786, he disposed of the Kingdom of Prussia in his will as if it had been one of his horses. "I bequeath unto my dear nephew, Frederick William, as unto my immediate successor, the Kingdom of Prussia, the provinces, towns, palaces, forts, fortresses, all ammunition and a.r.s.enals, all lands mine by inheritance or right of conquest, the crown jewels, gold and silver service of plate in Berlin, country houses, collections of coins, picture galleries, gardens, and so forth." Contrast this will with the utterances of Was.h.i.+ngton and Hamilton made at the same time!

In the Grand Duchies of Mecklenburg, serfdom was not abolished until 1819.

The spies and the influencers of American correspondents made their headquarters at a large Berlin hotel. A sketch of their activities is given by de Beaufort in his book, "Behind the German Veil."

Among the American correspondents in Berlin during the war great credit should be given to Carl W. Ackerman and Seymour B. Conger, correspondents of the United and a.s.sociated Presses respectively, who at all times and in spite of their surroundings and in the face of real difficulties preserved their Americanism unimpaired and refused to succ.u.mb to the alluring temptations held out to them. I do not mean to imply that the other correspondents were not loyal, but the pro-Germanism of many of them unfortunately gave the Imperial Foreign Office and the great general staff a wrong impression of Americans. It is the splendid patriotism under fire of Ackerman and Conger that deserves special mention.

CHAPTER XX

LAST

I was credited by the Germans with having hoodwinked and jollied the Foreign Office and the Government into refraining for two years from using illegally their most effective weapon.

This, of course, is not so. I always told the Foreign Office the plain simple truth and the event showed that I correctly predicted the att.i.tude of America.

Our American national game, poker, has given us abroad an unfair reputation. We are always supposed to be bluffing. A book was published in Germany about the President called, "President Bluff."

I only regret that those high in authority in Germany should have preferred to listen to pro-German correspondents who posed as amateur super-Amba.s.sadors rather than to the authorised representatives of America. I left Germany with a clear conscience and the knowledge that I had done everything possible to keep the peace.

An Amba.s.sador, of course, does not determine the policy of his own country. One of his princ.i.p.al duties, if not the princ.i.p.al one, is to keep his own country informed--to know beforehand what the country to which he is accredited will do, and I think that I managed to give the State Department advance information of the moves of the rulers of Germany.

I had the support of a loyal and devoted staff of competent secretaries and a.s.sistants, and both Secretaries Bryan and Lansing were most kind in the backing given by their very ably organised department.

I sent Secretary Lansing a confidential letter every week and, of course, received most valuable hints from him. Secretary Lansing was very successful in his tactful handling of the American Amba.s.sadors abroad and in getting them to work together as cheerful members of the same team.

When I returned to America, after living for two and a half years in the centre of this world calamity, everything seemed petty and small. I was surprised that people could still seek little advantages, still be actuated by little jealousies and revenges.

Freed from the round of daily work I felt for the first time the utter horror and uselessness of all the misery these Prussian military autocrats had brought upon the world; and what a reckoning there will be in Germany some day when the plain people realise the truth, when they learn what base motives actuated their rulers in condemning a whole generation of the earth to war and death!

Is it not a shame that the world should have been so disturbed; that peaceful men are compelled to lie out in the mud and filth in the depth of raw winter, shot at and stormed at and sh.e.l.led, waiting for a chance to murder some other inoffensive fellow creature? Why must the people in old Poland die of hunger, not finding dogs enough to eat in the streets of Lemberg? The long lines of broken peasants in Serbia and in Roumania; the population of Belgium and Northern France torn from their homes to work as slaves for the Germans; the poor prisoners of war starving in their huts or working in factories and mines; the cries of the old and the children, wounded by bombs from Zeppelins; the wails of the mothers for their sons; the very rustling of the air as the souls of the ten million dead sweep to another world,--why must all these horrors come upon a fair green earth, where we believed that love and help and friends.h.i.+p, genius and science and commerce, religion and civilisation, once ruled?

It is because in the dark, cold Northern plains of Germany there exists an autocracy, deceiving a great people, poisoning their minds from one generation to another and preaching the virtue and necessity of war; and until that autocracy is either wiped out or made powerless, there can be no peace on earth.

The golden dream of conquest was almost accomplished. A little more advance, a few more wagon loads of ammunition, and there would have been no battle of the Marne, no Joffre, a modern Martel, to hammer back the invading hordes of barbarism.

I have always stated that Germany is possessed yet of immense military power; and, to win, the nations opposed to Germany must learn to think in a military way. The mere entrance, even of a great nation like our own, into the war, means nothing in a military way unless backed by military power.

And there must be no German peace. The old _regime_, left in control of Germany, of Bulgaria, of Turkey, would only seek a favourable moment to renew the war, to strive again for the mastery of the world.

Fortunately America bars the way,--America led by a fighting President who win allow no compromise with brutal autocracy.

THE END