Chapter VIII: The Americans

On the occasion, nine or ten years ago, when it was my privilege to be presented for the first time to that most sane and suave of German statesmen, Prince Buelow--it was at one of his so-called "parliamentary evenings" at the Imperial Chancellor's Palace during the political season,--he inquired, pleasantly:

"How long are you remaining in Germany?"

"Just as long as Your Serene Highness will permit," I responded, half facetiously and half seriously, for foreign correspondents are occasionally expelled from Germany for pernicious professional activity.

For the ten days preceding August 1, 1914, while the European cloudburst was gathering momentum, such time as I could spare from the chase for the nimble item was devoted to patching up my journalistic fences in Berlin, with a view to remaining there throughout the war. There was at that time no conclusive indication that England would be involved. Having seen Germany in full and magnificent stride in peace, I was overwhelmingly anxious to watch her in the practise of her real profession. As an American citizen and special correspondent of three great American newspapers--the _New York Times, Philadelphia Public Ledger_ and _Chicago Tribune_--and fully accredited as such in German official quarters, I had every reason to hope that, even if England were drawn into the war (as to which I, myself, was never in doubt), my previous status as Berlin correspondent of Lord Northcliffe's _Daily Mail_ would not interfere with my remaining in Germany as an American writing exclusively for American papers. It was, of course, obvious that if this permission were granted me, my connection with the British news organization, which for years was Germany's _bete noire_, would have automatically to cease.

In Ambassador Gerard, as ever, I found a ready supporter of my plans. He recognized, as I did, that a "_Daily Mail_ man," particularly one who had specialized, as I did for eight years, in publishing as much as I dared about Germany's palpable preparations for war, would perhaps be on thin ice in asking favors of the Kaiser's Government at such an hour. But Judge Gerard also knew that, while persistently doing my duty in reporting the sleepless machinations of the German War Party to attain "a place in the sun," I had written copiously in England and with equal faithfulness of the many attractive and favorable aspects of German life and institutions. In 1913 I produced a little book, _Men Around the Kaiser_, which from cover to cover was a sincere hymn of praise of almost everything Teutonic. This foreigner's tribute to the real source of modern German greatness--the Fatherland's captains of science, art, letters, commerce, finance and industry--was considered so fair and flattering to the Germans that _Maenner um den Kaiser_, a German translation, went through eight editions to the two of the English original. During the Zabern army upheaval in Alsace-Lorraine in the winter of 1913-14 an article of mine in _The Daily Mail_ entitled "What the Colonel Said" was the only presentation of the German military attitude published in England. Even the War Party newspapers in Berlin honored me with a reproduction of that attempt to interpret the Prussian point of view that, where the sacredness of the King's tunic is at stake, all other considerations vanish into insignificance.

The Ambassador suggested, in the always practical way of American diplomacy, that I should assemble for him a _dossier_ of some of my newspaper work in Berlin showing that I had consistently attempted to show the bright, as well as the dark side, of the German picture. Judge Gerard promised to submit my desire to remain in Germany during war, if war came, to Foreign Secretary von Jagow and to recommend that my aspiration should be gratified. It was welcome news which the Ambassador was finally enabled to give me on August 1, that the Foreign Secretary had considered my application and granted it. I rejoiced that a long-cherished ambition seemed on the brink of realization--to see the terrible German war-machine at work, to report its sanguinary operations from the inside, and perhaps some day to record in a book, which would have been incomparably more vital than this bloodless narrative, my close-range impressions of man-killing as an applied art.

I was not the only American appealing to our Embassy for amelioration of my troubles about this time. In fact there were so many others--hundreds and hundreds of them--that the Ambassador and his small staff ceased altogether to be diplomats and became merely comforters of distracted compatriots plunged suddenly into the abyss of terror and helplessness in a strange land by the specter of war. From early morning till long past midnight Wilhelms Platz 7, the dignified home maintained by the Gerards as American headquarters in Germany, was besieged by a mob of stranded or semi-stranded fellow citizens who flocked to the Embassy like chicks running to cover beneath the protecting wing of a mother hen. Never even in the history of Cook's was so frantic a conclave of the personally conducted assembled. They wanted two things and wanted them at once--money and facilities to get out of Germany with the least possible delay. That bespectacled school-marm from Paducah, Kentucky, had not come to Berlin to eat war bread and spend her spare time proving her identity at the police station--she moaned in tearful accents. That aldermanic committee of Battle Creek, Michigan, was not getting what it bargained for--study of Berlin's sewage farms and municipal labor exchanges. Its main concern now was to reach Dutch or Scandinavian territory, with the minimum of procrastination. That portly Chicago millionaire's wife yonder, when she bought a letter of credit on the Dresdner Bank, had not figured even on the remote possibility of its refusing to hand her over all the money she might care to draw. The moment had come, she was vociferating, to see what "American citizenship amounts to, anyhow," and what she demanded was a special train to warless frontiers, and then a ship to take her "home." These were just a few of the plaints and claims which issued in a crescendo of insistence and panic from these neurotic tourist folk, who, in tones often more imperious than appealing, wanted to know what "Our Government" intended to do with its war refugees and refugettes cruelly trapped in Armageddonland.

Americans who come to Europe proverbially feel a proprietary interest in their Embassies, Legations and Consulates. The Berlin Ambassador for years put in much valuable time assuaging the grief and disappointment of brother patriots who felt a God-given right to gratify such trifling ambitions as an audience with the Kaiser, an inspection of the German army or minor favors like exploration of the German educational system under the personal chaperonage of the Minister for Culture. Then, of course, there was the ever-present "German-Americans," who, having slipped away from their beloved Fatherland in youth without performing military service, would risk a visit to native haunts in later life, only to fall victim to the German military police system which has a long memory and a still longer arm for such transgressors. On many such an occasion, even when, like a Chicago man I know, the "German-American" stole back under an assumed name, the paternal diplomatic intervention of the United States has saved the "deserter" from a felon's cell in his "Fatherland."

By the morning of August 4, the American panic in Berlin began to assume truly disastrous dimensions. The Embassy was literally jammed with fretting men, and weepy women and children. Every room overflowed with them. The cry was now for passports. It was coming from all parts of the country. All foreigners were suspect, English-speaking ones in particular, and the German police were demanding in martial tone that _Auslaender_ should "legitimatize" themselves.

The railways were available now only for troops. The Hamburg-American and North German Lloyd had canceled all their west-bound sailings, and our Consular officials in Hamburg and Bremen were telegraphing the Berlin Embassy that they, too, were stormed by throngs of Americans in various stages of anxiety, fear and financial embarrassment. From Frankfort-on-the-Main came a similar tale of woe. All around that delightful city are famous German watering places--Bad Nauheim, Homburg, Wiesbaden, Langen-Schwalbach, Baden-Baden, Kissingen and the like--and American "cure-guests," regardless of their rheumatism, heart troubles, gout and other frailties for which German waters are a panacea, forgot such insignificant woes in the now crowning anguish to own a passport which would designate them as peaceable and peace-loving children of the Stars and Stripes.

The Embassy rapidly and patiently mastered the situation. Mrs. Gerard converted herself into the adopted mother of every lachrymose American woman and child squatted on her broad marble staircase. Mrs. Gherardi, the wife of our Naval Attache, and Mrs. Ruddock, the wife of the Third Secretary, who were at the time the only feminine members of the Embassy family, resourcefully seconded the Ambassadress' efforts to soothe the emotions of the sobbing sisters and youngsters from Iowa and Maine, from Pennsylvania and Texas, from Montana and Florida, and from nearly all the other States of the Union, who refused to view qualmless the prospect of remaining shut up for Heaven knew how long in war-mad Germany, already effectually isolated from the rest of the world behind an impenetrable ring of steel. As for the men of the Embassy, from the Ambassador down to "Wilhelm," the old German doorkeeper who has initiated two generations of American diplomats into the mysteries of their profession in Berlin, no faithful servants of an ungrateful Republic ever came so valiantly to the rescue of fellow taxpayers. The Embassy apartments, including the Ambassador's own sanctuary, were turned into offices which looked for all the world like a Census Bureau. Every available space for a desk was usurped by somebody taking applications for passports or filling up the passports themselves, to be turned over to Judge Gerard in an unceasing stream for his signature and seal. Uncle Sam surely never raked in so many two-dollar fees at one killing in all the history of his Berlin office. Nor did American citizens, I fancy, ever part with money which they considered half so good an investment.

The Embassy itself, hopelessly understaffed for such an emergency, was, of course, quite unequal to the enormous strain suddenly imposed upon it, so volunteer attaches and clerks were gladly pressed into service. There, for instance, sat a Guggenheim copper magnate, who probably never lifts a pen except to sign a million-dollar check, at work with a mantel-piece as a desk, recording the vital statistics of a Vermont grocery-man who wanted a passport. In another corner sat Henry White, ex-Ambassador in Rome and Paris, scribbling away at breakneck pace, in order that the age, complexion and height of that trembling Vassar graduate might be quickly and accurately inscribed in an application for a Yankee parchment. There, with the arm of a chair as his desk, was Professor Jeremiah W. Jenks, great authority on political economy, currency and trusts, patiently extorting the story of his life from the coroner of the Minnesota county who had been caught in the German war maelstrom in the midst of an investigation of municipal morgues. What a vast practical experience of inquests he might have reaped had he remained in Europe! And over there, looking out on the Wilhelms Platz, with a window-sill as a writing-board, the Titian-haired belle of Berlin's American colony, in daintiest of midsummer frocks and saucy turbans, who had never in years done anything more strenuous than organize a tea-party, was in harness as a volunteer in the impromptu army of Uncle Sam's clerks, doing her bit for her country and country-folk. It was all very typically and very delightfully American, a composite of true Democracy in which one is for all, and all for one. I like to doubt if there are any other people on earth who turn in and help one another in a spirit of all-engulfing national comradeship so readily, so unconventionally and so good-naturedly as Americans. That drama of companionship in misery and adaptability to emergency conditions, which held the boards at the American Embassy in Berlin during the first week of the Great War, will live long in the memory of those who witnessed it as one of the striking impressions of a Brobdingnagian moment.

Obviously things would have been different if the crisis had not found two real Americans in command of the Embassy in the persons of Mr. and Mrs. Gerard. When the typical New Yorker whom President Wilson sent to Berlin less than a year previous was first presented to his compatriots at a little function at which it was my honor to preside, the man whom political detractors contemptuously referred to as "a Tammany Judge" made a "keynote speech," which he meant to be interpreted as his "policy" in Germany, as far as Americans were concerned. He said: "When the time comes for me to retire from Berlin, if you will call me the most American Ambassador who ever represented you in Germany, you can call me after that anything you please."

Two years--what years--have elapsed since "Jimmy" Gerard made public avowal of his conception of what United States diplomatic representatives abroad ought to be--Americans, first, last and all the time. As these lines are written German-American official relations seem on the verge of rupture and our embassy's remaining days in Berlin appear to be calculable in hours. Whether it shall turn out that the _Arabic_ insult was after all swallowed as the _Lusitania_ infamy was stomached, or whether Judge Gerard is finally recalled from Berlin as a protest extracted at length from the most patient, reluctant and long-suffering Government on record, he will richly have realized his ambition--to be "the most American Ambassador" ever accredited to the German court. In my time in Berlin I knew four American ambassadors. Each one was a credit to his nation. But "Jimmy" Gerard was "the most American," and I count that, in a citizen of the United States called to _represent_ his country abroad, the superlative quality. The seductive atmosphere of a Court in which adulation was obsequiously practised, especially toward Americans, never turned the head of Judge Gerard or his wife. They had far more than the share of hobnobbing with Royalty which falls to the lot of diplomatic newcomers in Berlin. Princes and princesses came with unwonted freedom to Wilhelms Platz 7. They found the former Miss Daly, of Anaconda, Montana, being a natural young American woman, as much at ease in their gilded presence as she was the day before when presiding over the tempestuous deliberations of the American Woman's Club out on Prager Platz.

To me the Gerards, apart from their personal charm, unaffected dignity and joyous Americanism, always were psychologically interesting because they typified so splendidly that greatest of our national traits--adaptability. To be dropped into the vortex of European political life, with its gaping pitfalls and brilliant opportunities for mistakes, is not child's play even for the most experienced of men and women. France, for example, regarded no name in its diplomatic register less eminent than that of a Cambon fit to head its mission to Berlin. England kept at the Hohenzollern court the most gifted ambassador on the Foreign Office's active list--Sir Edward Goschen. Unthinking Americans, by which I mean those who underestimate our inherent capacity to land on our feet, may have had their misgivings when a mere Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York and the daughter of a Montana copper king were sent to represent America among professional diplomats of the highest European rank. But "Jimmy" and "Molly" Gerard made good. It is the American way, and because it is that, it is their way. As for the Ambassador, he has demonstrated, to my way of thinking, that a graduate course in the university of American politics is ideal training for diplomacy. Intelligence, tact, resourcefulness and courage, the rudiments of the diplomatic career, are qualities which surely nothing can develop in a man more thoroughly than the hurly-burly, rough-and-tumble, give-and-take of an American electioneering campaign. It is amid its storms and tribulations that a man learns to be something more than an inhabited dress-suit. It is there he acquires the art of being human. It is there that he comes to appreciate the priceless value of loyalty. United States Presidents do not err seriously when they hunt for ambassadors among men who have been through the preparatory school from which "Jimmy" Gerard holds a _magnum cum laude_.

My personal observations of Judge Gerard's ambassadorial methods are based for the most part on his career before the war. But he has not departed from them during the war. Bismarck laid it down as a maxim that an ambassador should not be "too popular" at the court to which he was accredited. From all one can gather, "Jimmy" Gerard has not laid himself open to that charge in Berlin since August, 1914. Nobody who knows him ever suspected for a moment that he would. Toadying is not in his lexicon, and aggressively pro-American ambassadors are condemned in advance to be disliked in Germany. They do not fit into the Teutonic diplomatic scheme. If they are inspired by such unconventional aspirations as those to which Judge Gerard gave utterance in his "keynote speech" to the American Luncheon Club of Berlin, it is morally certain that their usefulness--to Germany--is limited.

The American Ambassador had been acting for Great Britain in the enemy's country barely thirty-six hours, when Sir Edward Goschen, Great Britain's retiring Ambassador in Berlin, in his official report on the knightly treatment accorded him and his staff during their last hours on German soil, wrote:

"I should also like to mention the great assistance rendered to us all by my American colleague, Mr. Gerard, and his staff. Undeterred by the hooting and hisses with which he was often greeted by the mob on entering and leaving the Embassy, His Excellency came repeatedly to see me, to ask how he could help us and to make arrangements for the safety of stranded British subjects. He extricated many of these from extremely difficult situations at some personal risk to himself and his calmness and _savoir faire_ and his firmness in dealing with the Imperial authorities gave full assurance that the protection of British subjects and interests could not have been left in more efficient and able hands."

Nobody who ever knew "Jimmy" Gerard--that is the affectionate way in which old friends and even acquaintances of brief duration almost invariably speak of him--would expect him to be anything in the world except "undeterred" by the cowardly onslaughts of the Berlin barbarians. An expert swimmer, clever amateur boxer, crack shot, volunteer soldier and veteran of New York politics, "Jimmy" Gerard never knew the meaning of the word fear, and the unfailing courage with which he has "stood up" to the Kaiser's Government throughout the various crises of the war has been in full keeping with his virile temperament.

It is sometimes said that our diplomatic system, or such as it is, reduces American ambassadors and ministers to the status of messenger-boys, who have little to do but to carry back and forth between their offices and the foreign ministries to which they are accredited the communications and instructions which Washington sends them. There could, of course, be no more obtuse misconception. Berlin, the capital of _Macht-politik_, is particularly a capital in which everything depends on the manner in which a foreign Government's views are expressed or its wishes conveyed. It has not been my privilege to be behind the innocuous von Jagow's screen when "Jimmy" Gerard strolled across the Wilhelms Platz to the ramshackle old _Auswaertiges Amt_, to tell the German Government what Washington thought of this, that or the other of her recurring acts of lawlessness, but I vow that von Jagow has got to know Gerard for just what he is--an American from the top of his extraordinarily well-shaped head to the soles of his feet. The war has brought us many blessings. Among them we may count high the fact that at the capital of the enemy of all mankind we had, ready to speak up and to stand up for us, in gladness or vicissitude, a real man.

No story of our Berlin war Embassy would be complete without a reference to the Ambassador's lieutenants, who, inspired by his own example of unruffled good nature and limitless patience, capably played their own trying parts. At Judge Gerard's right hand was Joseph Clark Grew, First Secretary, Harvard '02, who, having shot wild beasts in the jungles of Asia, would naturally not quail before Germans, no matter how stormy the conditions. Grew is one of the exceptional young men in our diplomatic service, because, he has weathered its snares unspoiled. A distinguished secretarial career at such important posts as Cairo, Mexico City, Vienna, Petrograd and Berlin, in the course of which he frequently acted as Ambassador or Minister in charge, has left him, at thirty-five, as natural, human and American as no doubt many Harvard men are while still beneath the democratizing influence of the campus elms. I mention the preservation of these qualities in Grew because they have been known to disappear in many of our worthy young fellow countrymen, jumped precipitately from college into representative positions abroad, and who thenceforth refused to brush shoulders with anything beneath the rank of royalty.

In Roland B. Harvey and Albert Billings Ruddock, respectively Second and Third Secretaries, Judge Gerard was also the fortunate possessor of a couple of adjutants who, in the presence of emergency, showed that hustle and _bonhomie_, besides being American talents, are diplomatic traits of no mean order. To preserve calm during the passport stampede of the first week of August, 1914, was to exhibit the _finesse_ of a Disraeli. Harvey and Ruddock are types of the younger generation of American diplomatists who go in for the career with a view to devoting themselves to its serious side and from among whom, some day, we ought to evolve a professional service worthy of the name. Neither of them ever struck me as being afflicted by such emotions as filled the breast of a certain well-known young man when promoted from a European first-secretaryship to one of our important ministerships in South America. "Well, old boy," I asked him, "what do you think about going to ----?" "Oh," he rejoined, "I suppose it's all right, but it's a h-- of a way from Paris!"

I must not end this chapter, which I hope is recognizable as a poor expression of gratitude to all concerned for many kindnesses rendered, without a mention of the youngest, but by no means the least meritorious member, of the Berlin war Embassy family--Lanier Winslow, the Ambassador's ever-ebullient private secretary. War sobered Winslow so rapidly that he committed matrimony before it was six months old. I can hear him now, in the midst of the passport panic, still imitating Frank Tinney or humming _Get Out and Get Under_, just as Nero might have done if Rome had known what rag-time was. At an hour when it was most needed, Lanier Winslow was a paragon of good humor, and altogether, by common consent, a thing of beauty and a joy forever.