Chapter XIV: 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.