Chapter XII: Safe Conduct

Lehrter Bahnhof, the gateway through which so many American tourists have passed out of Berlin en route to Hamburg or Bremen steamers, was not _en fete_ in honor of the departing _Englaender_. My memory traveled back irresistibly to the last time the British Embassy in force was assembled there--to greet King George and Queen Mary when they arrived to visit the German Court in May, 1913. The rafters rang on that occasion with the blare of a Prussian Guards band thundering _God Save the King_, cousins George and William embraced fondly and kissed, and the station was swathed in the entwined colors of Germany and England. It was a different and forbidding aspect which the old brick and steel barn of a train-shed presented this muggy August morning. At every entrance sentries in gray and policemen with Brownings at the belt stood guard, for railways and stations were now as integral a part of the war-machine as fortresses and guns. Inside, infantrymen in gray from head to foot--all Germany had now grown gray--carrying rifles with fixed bayonets patrolled the platforms, searching each Englishman, as he came along, with glances mingling watchfulness and contempt.

Our band of pilgrims, who were to be some forty or fifty in all, arrived in detachments, having, as Sir Edward Goschen himself officially described it, "been smuggled away from the Embassy in taxicabs by side streets." The Ambassador himself was one of the last to turn up. No Imperial emissary came to wish him a happy journey and _Auf Wiedersehen_, though the Foreign Secretary deputized young Count Wedel to say good-by in his name. The Kaiser's farewell greeting to Sir Edward was conveyed the day before, when the All-Highest sent an adjutant with majestic regrets for the sacking of the Embassy premises on the night the war broke out. Of markedly less apologetic tenor was the adjutant's message that William II, "now that Great Britain had taken sides with other nations against her old allies of Waterloo, must at once divest himself of the titles of British Field Marshal and British Admiral." The uniforms, orders and decorations conferred on him by Perfidious Albion had desecrated the exalted person of the supreme Hohenzollern for the last time. In the memorable dispatch in which he so dispassionately narrated his final hours in Berlin, Sir Edward Goschen sufficiently indicated the true character of the Kaiser's _adieu_ by mentioning that "the message lost none of its acerbity by the manner of its delivery." As a Prussian officer was firing it at the official incarnation of Great Britain, it is not difficult to imagine the mien and tone of the proud functionary on whom had been conferred the historic distinction of breathing Hate in the face of the foe at that cataclysmic hour.

I shall always hold it a privilege to have been in contact with Sir Edward Goschen during the days which preceded the war and in the hours of its beginning. He was throughout an object-lesson in imperturbability. In the midst of his holidays in England when the crisis arose, having left Kiel early in July with the British squadron, he returned hurriedly to his post in Berlin just before the match was applied to the powder-barrel. I recall distinctly the invincible state of his good humor when I visited him at the Embassy on July 31, only an hour or two before the Kaiser declared Germany to be in "a state of war."

"Wile," he remarked, fastening upon me a gaze which very successfully simulated vexation, "what did you mean by libeling me in that dispatch of yours from Kiel on the Kaiser's visit to our flagship? You had the effrontery to suggest that I was lolling about the quarter-deck in a tweed suit. I would have you understand that my costume afloat is always the regulation navy-blue!"

I pleaded color-blindness. I said that from our perch behind the thirteen-and-one-half-inch gun turret for'd, it looked to me as if His Excellency had actually worn tweed.

"Well, I didn't," he insisted, "and you caused me to be twitted not a little in London for my apparent ignorance of battleship etiquette."

Sir Edward Goschen, unlike other British Ambassadors I knew in Berlin, was never at any moment of his career there under any delusions as to the _leitmotif_ of German policy toward Great Britain. No Teutonic wool was ever pulled over his eyes. During the week of tension which ended with war, he bore himself with tact and firmness characteristic of the highest diplomatic traditions. Though never surrendering a position in the trying negotiations with the Kaiser's Government, the Ambassador did not cease, up to the hour when he asked for his passports, to labor for such peace as would be consistent with British interests. It is not customary in the British service, I believe, to send a diplomatic official back to a country with which England has meantime been at war, but Sir Edward Goschen could return to Berlin with his head high, enjoying not only, I am sure, the limitless confidence of his own Government, but the unalloyed respect of Germany, as well.

Our party having been politely herded into the royal waiting-room of the station, a couple of silk-hatted and frock-coated young Foreign Office officials now buzzed busily about us, checking off our respective names and identities on their duplicate lists, lest no unauthorized _Englaender_ should escape through the ring of steel drawn tight around Germany's frontiers. Our safe-conduct train had now pulled in. We found ourselves a somewhat indiscriminate collection of refugees. Besides Sir Edward Goschen, there was, of course, the full embassy family of secretaries, attaches, clerks, the wives of one or two of them, and one bonnie group of babes with their blue-and-white "nannies." Sir Horace Rumbold, the Counselor of the Embassy, who had conducted the initial negotiations with Germany, monocled and unruffled, was as calm as if he were starting off for a week-end in the country. Captain Henderson, the Naval Attache, and a prince of sailormen, had no inkling of the undying discomfiture soon to be his, as an ingloriously interned captive in neutral Holland, for his first assignment from the Admiralty was to command a detachment of the ill-starred naval expedition to Antwerp. Colonel Russell, the Military Attache, was quitting German soil with emotions a little different from those of the rest of us, for he had seen the light of day at Potsdam in 1874, while his late father, Lord Ampthill, was British Ambassador to Germany. It was only a few weeks previous that the colonel's own Berlin-born son had been christened "William" under the august Godfatherhood of the Kaiser, who sent the babe a golden cup emblazoned with the Hohenzollern arms. With us, too, were Messrs. Gurney, Rattigan, Monck, Thomas and Astell, Sir Edward Goschen's able staff of secretaries and young attaches, who had all "sat tight," in their British way, so splendidly during the preceding forty-eight hours. The official party also included the British Minister to Saxony, Mr. Grant-Duff, and Lady Grant-Duff, whose windows in Dresden had been broken, too, and Messrs. Charlton and Turner of the Berlin and Leipzig consulates, respectively.

The journalist-refugees consisted of Mackenzie and Jelf of _The Times_, Tower and Nevinson of _The Daily News_, Long of _The Westminster Gazette_, Lawrence of Reuter's Agency, Byles of _The Standard_, Dudley Ward, of the _Manchester Guardian_ and his newly-wed German wife, and Muirhead, the "camera man" of _The Daily Chronicle_. Poor Jelf, who enlisted within a week after his arrival in England, was killed in action during the great offensive fighting in Artois, in September, 1915. Among the others whom Sir Edward Goschen had rescued from the maws of Hate was a little Australian woman, Mrs. Gunderson, trapped in Germany with her husband at the outbreak of war. They had journeyed around the world on their honeymoon to enable him to participate in an international chess match at Mannheim. He has been stalemated ever since at the British concentration camp at Ruhleben--Berlin. Then there was an estimable old English couple who had spent a night in jail on the charge of being "spies" prowling about the German countryside in their touring-car. They were not bemoaning the loss of their automobile in the presence of their own escape and that of their chauffeur. One of the luckiest of our traveling companions was Captain Deedes, a British army officer who was passing through Germany on his way home from service in Turkey, and just gained the precincts of the British Embassy before being nabbed by the police. We shuddered to think of the fate of Captain Holland of the British navy, also en route from Constantinople, who had not been so fortunate, and was now locked up at Spandau. I was the sole and lonely American member of the caravan.

The Germans provided Sir Edward Goschen with a "corridor train" of first-class cars, including "saloon carriages," which are a combination of parlor and sleeping cars, for himself and his immediate entourage, and for Baron Beyens, the Belgian Minister to Berlin, and his staff, who, appropriately enough, were conducted to the frontier along with the British. Baron Beyens has contributed to the genesis of the war not the least noteworthy evidence of Germany's felonious designs on European liberties and peace. As has been revealed by a Belgian Grey Book, the Baron was able to report to his government as early as July 26 that "the German General Staff regarded war as inevitable and near, and expected success on account of Germany's superiority in heavy guns and the unpreparedness of Russia." Baron Beyens also described his final and dramatic conversation with the German Foreign Secretary, who "announced with pain" Germany's determination to violate Belgian neutrality, and asked to be allowed to occupy Liege. The request was refused, Herr von Jagow admitting to the Minister that no other answer was possible. The Belgians had another "answer" up their sleeve, though von Jagow knew it not. It was the shambles into which the flower of the German Guard plunged at Liege a week later.

Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar, a dapper little gray-haired Prussian officer with a Kaiser mustache and a heel-clicking manner, presently approached Sir Edward Goschen, saluted, introduced himself as the military chaperon of the party, and invited us to troop into the train. An armed guard, a strapping infantryman with glistening bayonet affixed to his shouldered rifle, was already aboard. He turned out, as did the lieutenant-colonel himself, to be a very harmless warden. When the _Oberstleutnant_, gloved and helmeted as if on dress parade, was not snoozing or reading during the journey, he merely hovered about, mother-like, to see that his charges were comfortable, as well as not up to mischief. In addition to the ordinary train-crew, we were shepherded by seven or eight plain-clothes Prussian detectives, whom even the ruse of regulation railway-caps could not disguise. You can tell a German "secret policeman," as he is idiomatically called, at least a mile off. He is the last word in palpability.

Our destination, we learned, was the Hook of Holland, where either a Great Eastern steamer or a British cruiser would pick us up. We were to travel via Hanover-Osnabrueck to Amsterdam and thence to the sea. Mackenzie, Jelf and I, having preempted a compartment, settled down at the windows for a last long look at Berlin as the train now tugged slowly out of the station, a few minutes past eight o'clock. Speaking for myself, I am quite sure that railway trucks never rattled with such sweet melody as those beneath us were producing, for with every chug they were bringing us nearer to liberty. I remember a distinct feeling of consciousness that I should not consider myself an utterly freed felon until German territory was actually no longer under my feet. It was an indescribably gratifying sensation, all sufficient for the moment, to realize that Berlin at least was fading into oblivion. Whether any of my British colleagues were throbbing with similar emotions, I never knew. It is un-English, I believe, to reveal emotions even if one is battling with them. Whatever thoughts were in their minds, I myself was obsessed with a distinct desire, at that moment, to blot Berlin from my mind for all eternity. Perhaps, as I thus soliloquized, I was giving way unconsciously to a passing spell of that unreasoning malice which infested hate-maddened Berlin. I suppose I ought to have shed briny tears, as we skirted Spandau and sped across the dreary plain of the Mark of Brandenburg, and familiar landmarks passed from view. Certainly in the long ago, I had firmly made up my mind that when my time to leave Germany came I should go away with genuine regret. Life in the Fatherland had meant much to me and mine. Although I never adopted it, like Lord Haldane, as my "spiritual home," a man can not spend thirteen years of middle life in the same community, however alien to its spirit and institutions, without forming deep-rooted attachments. But the circumstances which precipitated me out of Germany conspired, I fear, to quench old-time affection. So, ungrateful as it may appear, my handkerchief was not brought into play and my eyes were uncommonly dry as the sand-wastes of Brandenburg vanished from our vision....

It was evident that we were in for a tedious journey and that our trek across Western Germany was to be agony long drawn out. Berlin to Hanover, the first leg of the trip, was one I had accomplished times innumerable under three hours, and even a _Bummelzug_ hardly took longer. It was to take us nearly three times as long to-day. Mobilization was technically complete, but every railway track in the country, especially if it fed the great trunk-line to the west along which we were traveling, was still choked with troop trains. In consequence, though ours was a "special," we had to halt, back up, sidetrack and perform every other gyration of which a train is capable, whenever we came up with battalions en route toward one of the three frontiers on which German blood was now being spilled. At every station we encountered trainloads of men in gray, singing, cheering and laughing as if bound for a picnic instead of slaughter. It was always they who had the right of way, for it was soon borne in upon us that the meanest detachment of reservists bulked larger in Germany's eye just then than "the whole bally British diplomatic service put together," as Jelf irreverently expressed it. Never at any time were we doing anything dizzier than twenty miles an hour, and we figured that if we reached Hanover by dinner-time, we should be fortunate. As to London, which we used to reach twenty hours after leaving Berlin, it became painfully obvious that it would be nearer forty this trip.

But there was much to see, and to think and talk about. As we were being held up everywhere along the line by seemingly the entire male population of the Empire in uniform, it was not surprising, for one thing, to find the fields on either side of us as denuded of men as if Adam had never lived. None but women was discoverable at work on this eve of harvest, excepting here and there an old man, while children, too, were being pressed into service. At bridges, culverts and crossings, instead of the customary railway guards, who used to stand at salute with a flag as a train whirled past, there were now soldiers with rifles. No restrictions were placed upon our reconnoitering the adjacent country as long as we were in motion; but Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar, always heel-clicking and saluting beforehand, intimated to _Mein Herren_ that the curtains of their compartment-windows must be drawn as the train approached or halted at stations. There was no suspicion, he begged to assure us, that we might attempt to practise espionage about troop movements. On the contrary, the suggestion was a precaution recommended in our own interests. Unfortunately, quoth the apologetic colonel, it had not been feasible to conceal the identity of our train. Western Germany was bursting with patriotic frenzy, and it was just within the range of possibilities that their exuberance might beat itself into disagreeable "demonstrations." Therefore, discretion was obviously our cue.

But what we could not see at Nauen, Rathenow, Stendal, Gardelegen, Obisfelde and Lehrte, we could hear, for all the inhabitants of every hamlet and town in Central Germany appeared to have orders from somewhere to assemble at their railway-stations and sing themselves red in the face for Kaiser and Empire. Manifestly the Supreme War Lord had not only called up his armed legions, but mobilized the country's _Singvereine_ besides, and man, woman and child of them were now in the trenches with their throats bared to the foe. I suppose they were chanting _Die Wacht am Rhein_ and _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_ in other parts of Germany, too, but I have often thought that the country's most vociferous and tireless choral artists were concentrated on that day on the strategic line of the British safe-conduct train's route. If the Great General Staff at Berlin, with that incomparable attention to detail which is one of its vaunted accomplishments, schemed to send us out of Germany convinced, by the evidence of our own ears, that the Kaiser's people were sallying forth to war like Wagnerian heroes with music and triumphant cheers on their lips, the plan succeeded. My own indelible recollection of that farewell ride across Germany, at any rate, is the memory of song. For many days and nights afterward, _Die Wacht am Rhein_ and _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_, would ring and ring through my head. At the time it all seemed beautifully spontaneous, for the Germans are a singing folk, who put soul into their anthems, but reflection makes me wonder if that continuous song-service which so mercilessly accompanied us from Berlin to the Netherlands was not a stage-managed extravaganza with a motive. The Germans are a thorough race, and in war they overlook no opportunity.

It was only at times that the singing was anything else than merely monotonous--the periodical occasions when, if we halted longer than usual at a station, the singers would line up alongside the train so closely that they could fairly shout in our ears. Then there would be a note of ill-mannered defiance in their song. At Hanover we happened to be drawn up in the station at the very moment when the British Ambassador and the Belgian Minister were in the dining-car, and there was a particularly vehement vocal endurance competition outside of the window at which they were sitting. But from my own table on the opposite side of the car I observed that Sir Edward Goschen was not visibly diverted from his _Wiener-Schnitzel_, for, while the _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_ was doing its worst, he remarked, cheerily, to his Belgian colleague: "Rather fine singing, isn't it?"

Next to the songs which knew no ending the most conspicuous manifestation of _Furor Teutonicus_ was the chalking of troop-trains with exuberant inscriptions symbolical of expected great German victories to come. "Special to St. Petersburg" was a prime favorite. "Excursion to Paris" was extremely popular. That, we know, is exactly what the War Party expected the campaign to be. "Through Train to Moscow" ran a particularly sanguine sentiment and "Death to the Blood-Czar," a more sanguinary one. Then there would be rude caricatures of Nicholas II or President Poincare either at the end of a noose or of the boot of an equally rudely-cartooned Kaiser. And, of course, there were plenty of jests at Great Britain. "We'll soon be chewing roast-beef in London" was the way one artist epitomized his hopes. "Special Train to the Peddler-City"--a shaft at London, the home of the "shopkeeper nation" which "organized war against Germany" in order to "crush an unpleasant commercial rival." "Death to our enviers!" was the language in which another Anglophobe thought found expression. Beneath the British Ambassador's car-windows, I was told, some one had chalked a John Bull drooping ignominiously from the gallows, with "Race-Traitor" for an epitaph!

The night was fitful for us all. Curled up on the seats of our compartments, such attempts at sleep as we ventured were effectually defeated by _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_ and _Die Wacht am Rhein_. All through the night they were hurled at us. At every town, regardless of the hour, the choristers were on the job. We welcomed our arrival at Bentheim, the final station in Prussia, at seven next morning, not half so eagerly because it was the last of Germany as because it was the last of _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_ and _Die Wacht am Rhein_. For any sins we ever committed in the Fatherland, we felt we had been richly chastised. I understood now why General Sherman once crossed the Atlantic to escape _Marching through Georgia_--only to be bombarded with it beneath his windows before breakfast by an Irish band in Queenstown before he had been in Europe twelve hours. I am morally certain that when old Tecumseh said that "War is hell," he was thinking about _Marching through Georgia_. That is what _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_ made me think about Armageddon.

None of us experienced any special difficulty in restraining our emotions when Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar and our other German chaperons handed us over at Bentheim to a Dutch train crew awaiting our arrival there with a Dutch locomotive. The colonel clicked and bowed his farewell respects to Sir Edward Goschen and Baron Beyens, accepted their appreciations of his courtesy and helpfulness, saluted for the last time, and then formally transferred us to Queen Wilhelmina's tender mercies. The hour of our liberation was at hand. And for the first time in a week a score of Englishmen and at least one American thought out aloud their opinions about Germany and all her works. What some of us said about the Hohenzollerns has been put by Colonel Watterson in far more immortal diction than my poor pen could epitomize it.

At Rozendaal, the first station in Holland, there was a wild scramble from the newspaper coach for the railway telegraph-office. All of us had reams of "copy" to release, after having been muzzled for five days. German money, we were distressed to observe, was already at a discount in the Netherlands, and those of us who did not hand in Dutch or British gold had to put our "stuff" on the wire after more fortunate colleagues had beaten us to it with legal tender. A couple of hours later found us at Amsterdam, where representatives of the British Legation at The Hague and the local Consulate-General were on hand to greet Sir Edward Goschen's party and furnish us with the first news of actual war operations which we had had. Fighting at sea had begun. England had drawn first blood. The German mine-layer _Konigin Luise_, within eighteen hours of the declaration of hostilities, _i.e._, on Wednesday, August 5, was overtaken by the British destroyer _Lance_ and sunk in six minutes. There was reason to fear that a fleet of enemy mine-layers, masquerading as fishing-boats and in other pacific disguises, had been occupied for the better part of a week strewing mines through an area reaching from a point off Harwich--which we were soon to approach--along the east coast far up into Scottish waters. On the next day, Thursday, August 6, the British light cruiser _Amphion_ struck a mine planted by the _Konigin Luise_ and went down with heavy loss of life. Much more cheering was the news that gallant Belgium was giving the Germans a welcome they had not bargained for. The Meuse was being gloriously defended. Liege was menaced, but still untaken. Germans had been mown down by the regiment--if reports could be believed--and we devoured them eagerly. No news is ever so welcome as that which one longs to hear--even before it is confirmed.

The Hook was ready for us, we were told. The Great Eastern steamer _St. Petersburg_ was there awaiting our arrival, having the night before landed Prince Lichnowsky and the other members of the German Embassy in London. The Kaiser's emissary had passed to the ship through a British guard of honor, while shore batteries fired an ambassador's salute. How like Sir Edward Goschen's slinking departure from Berlin, we thought! Shortly after two o'clock the _St. Petersburg_ lifted anchor and amid typical North Sea weather, raw, rainy and misty, got under way. Few thought of German submarines at that time, but the Berlin Government, we pondered, had not guaranteed Sir Edward Goschen "safe conduct" through an indiscriminately sown field of floating mines. Quite obviously, we had now to pass through a zone bristling with uncertainty, to put it mildly. But we had not steamed far into the open sea before the sight of a British torpedo-boat flotilla on patrol convinced us that we were in a well-shepherded course. Then we had our first ocular demonstration of Jellicoe's unremitting vigilance, for the crescent of destroyers far forward now began rapidly to close in upon us. Our identity was apparently not known to them, and they were taking no chances. "They sent a shot across our bow yesterday, with the Germans on board," explained the skipper of the _St. Petersburg_ to Captain Henderson, the Naval Attache, who was with him on the bridge. Captain Henderson was not disturbed by the possibility of our getting an innocuous three-pounder in our wireless rigging or some other harmless token of the destroyers' solicitude, but he _was_ concerned lest so innocent a craft should cause British destroyer captains to burn up valuable oil fuel needlessly at such an hour. So the next I saw of Henderson he was wig-wagging mysterious messages with signal-flags from the bridge of the _St. Petersburg_, which told the destroyers, I suppose, that we weren't in the slightest respect worthy of their attention or shell. They wig-wagged something back which must have pleased Henderson, for presently he clambered down smilingly from the upper regions, and said: "_That's_ all right!"

Harwich hove into view at what should have been sundown. By six o'clock we were at the pier, boarded by the naval authorities of the port and the customs-men. Sir Edward Goschen's party, after the Ambassador himself had vouched for the identity of each and every one of us, was disembarked without formalities, and at six-forty-five P.M. of Friday, August 7, we found ourselves treading British soil. There were policemen, soldiers, reporters and photographers on the dock, but no formal welcoming delegation for the Ambassador. Somebody whispered to him that a special train would convey him and his refugees to London, and to it he took his way as undemonstratively as if he were a Cook's tourist back from a "tripper's" jaunt to the Continent. I remarked to Tower that I was afraid Americans would have made a real fuss over Goschen if he were _our_ Ambassador home from the enemy's country; whereupon _The Daily News_ man ejaculated something which was to ring in my ears for a year or more, whenever I presumed to comment on that strange phenomenon with which it is now my task to deal--England and the English in war-time: "Wile, you Americans can not understand the English character." Tower was right.

An American is general manager of the Great Eastern Railway. I strongly suspect that he must have had an alien hand in even the semblance of a "demonstration" of greeting which Sir Edward Goschen encountered when our train pulled into Liverpool Street Station a little after eleven o'clock. I did not wait to watch it, nor even to claim my baggage, for there was a hungry first edition waiting for my "story" at _The Daily Mail_ office, and to Carmelite House I flew in the first taxi into which I could leap. By midnight Beattie, the night editor, was tearing "copy" from my hands as fast as an Underwood could reel it off, and it was rapidly approaching breakfast-time when I called it a night's work and went to bed--in England at last.