The Assault Part 10

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 ident.i.ties on their duplicate lists, lest no unauthorized _Englander_ 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 emba.s.sy 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 Emba.s.sy, 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 a.s.signment 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 Amba.s.sador to Germany. It was only a few weeks previous that the colonel's own Berlin-born son had been christened "William" under the august G.o.dfatherhood 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 pa.s.sing through Germany on his way home from service in Turkey, and just gained the precincts of the British Emba.s.sy 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-cla.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Berlin newspaper refugees on S. S. St. Petersburg. From left to right, standing: Muirhead; Wile; Jelf; Lawrence; Nevinson; Captain Deedes; Dudley Ward. Seated, Mackenzie.]

Lieutenant-Colonel von b.u.t.tlar, 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-Osnabruck 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 inst.i.tutions, without forming deep-rooted attachments. But the circ.u.mstances 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 _b.u.mmelzug_ 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 b.u.t.tlar, 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 a.s.sure 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 ident.i.ty 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 a.s.semble 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 uber 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 uber 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 Amba.s.sador and the Belgian Minister were in the dining-car, and there was a particularly vehement vocal endurance compet.i.tion 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 uber 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 Amba.s.sador'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 uber 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 uber 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 Tec.u.mseh said that "War is h.e.l.l," he was thinking about _Marching through Georgia_. That is what _Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles_ made me think about Armageddon.

None of us experienced any special difficulty in restraining our emotions when Lieutenant-Colonel von b.u.t.tlar 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sir Edward Goschen, late British Amba.s.sador in Berlin, boarding S. S. St. Petersburg, en route to London, August 7th, 1914.]

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 fis.h.i.+ng-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 Emba.s.sy in London. The Kaiser's emissary had pa.s.sed to the s.h.i.+p through a British guard of honor, while sh.o.r.e batteries fired an amba.s.sador'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 pa.s.s 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 ident.i.ty 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 sh.e.l.l. 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 Amba.s.sador himself had vouched for the ident.i.ty 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 Amba.s.sador. 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_ Amba.s.sador home from the enemy's country; whereupon _The Daily News_ man e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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.

CHAPTER XIII

COMPLACENCY RULES THE WAVES

More than once during the last phase of our exciting journey to England, across the mine-strewn waters between the Hook and Harwich, I reflected that I seemed doomed to take up my residence on British soil in war-time. It was in the spring of 1900, in the anxious days between Ladysmith and Mafeking, when the tide of victory was still running in favor of the Boers, that I first arrived in London, and my lot was cast there for the succeeding year and a half of the South African struggle.

I felt certain that the feverish interest with which even the sluggish British temperament had followed every detail of a campaign ten thousand miles away, and which engrossed only a fraction of the Empire's strength, would pale into tepid insignificance compared to the concern which would be generated by a tremendous European war only a channel-crossing distant. But I had time for only one breakfast and one morning's papers before I realized that John Bull had donned, even for Armageddon, the garment in which his bosom swells the proudest--the armor of invincible inexcitability.

Actually the only wrought-up people in the British Isles during the first week of the war appeared to be the frantic American tourist refugees, who, of course, heavily outnumbered their brothers and sisters in wretchedness whom I had left behind in Germany. If it had not been for the frantic transatlantic sob and worry fraternity storming the steams.h.i.+p and express companies' offices in c.o.c.kspur Street and the Haymarket on the morning of Sat.u.r.day, August 8, when I went out to look for the war in London, no one could possibly have made me believe that such a thing existed. Such portions of the community as had not started for the links, the ocean, the river or the country "as usual" were demeaning themselves as self-respecting, imperturbable Britons customarily do on the edge of a "week-end." The seaside holiday season was at its zenith. The immortal "Twelfth," when grouse-shooting begins, was approaching. Everybody who was anybody was "out of town," and stayed there. It was only those fussy, fretting Americans who insisted upon losing their equilibrium and converting the most placid metropolis in the universe into a bedlam of unseemly agitation and alarm. It was "extraordinary," Englishmen said, how they resolutely declined to take a lesson from the composite stolidity of Britain, preferring to give their emotions unrestrained rein and to keep the cables hot in imperious demands for s.h.i.+ps, gold and other panaceas for the scared and stranded.

Which reminds me to say that traditional British hospitality to the stranger within the gate was never showered more graciously on American friends than in that trying hour.

The British had worried a whole week about the war already. That was a departure and a concession of no mean magnitude, for it is their boast and pride that they _never_ "worry." Having, however, yielded to such un-British instincts in the earliest hours of the crisis, they pulled themselves together and swore a solemn resolve, come what may, not soon again to succ.u.mb to indecorous habits which the world a.s.sociated exclusively with the explosive French or the irresponsibly impulsive "Yankees." I felt instinctively that an effectual rebuke was being administered to me personally by the writer of the following newspaper review of London after three days of war:

"A new metal has come into the London crowd out of the crucible of these last few days. The froth and fume of flag-wagging have evaporated; so, too, have lifted bone-quaking mists of dread and suspense. Exultation and depression are alike unhealthy. It is good that we are now free from them.

"The faces in the street are the barometers of the souls that men hide.

It does one's heart good to walk London and to behold that very notable rise--apparent to every one and swift in its example--of the mercury of the people. The great war took all our comprehensions unawares.

Although it has boded for years, it walked at last like an unbelievable spectre into a warm and lighted room. What wonder that we were shaken?

What wonder at a creeping ague of the spirit in front of the unknown?

"The dizziness has gone. The trial before us, black as it is, is not so black as our antic.i.p.ation of it. We have already surprised ourselves no less than we have confounded our enemies by our rally and our readiness.

The financial situation is saved, the banks re-open, the food supplies are safeguarded, and prices controlled.

"A tremendous accession of calmness and reliance has come to the nation by the appointment of Lord Kitchener to the War Office. The news that the Army is in his hands, a rock of a man, has swept through London like a vivifying breeze.

"London is swinging back to as much of its normal life as possible. She has found herself. She is bravely being the usual London--the great city serene."

Far more profitable, obviously, than hunting war excitement was examination of the causes which accounted for its absence, and to that I forthwith devoted myself. In the first place, there was the navy, "England's All in All." By a fortuitous circ.u.mstance, for which, with all his faults, the Empire must render imperishable grat.i.tude to its young half-American First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, the Fleet was instantly at its "war stations," fully mobilized, and in a state of battle-readiness and general efficiency unparalleled in British history. War maneuvers on an unapproached scale had been in progress for the preceding fortnight or three weeks. Only the merest word of command was wanting to convert the Grand Fleet into the battering-ram and s.h.i.+eld, to const.i.tute which in the hour of emergency it had been created. "Ringed by her leaden seas," which were held, moreover, by a "supreme" armada, there seemed every justification for equanimity, for the United Kingdom has no frontiers which an invading army can violate as long as Britannia rules the waves.

The domestic political situation, more menacingly turbulent than at any time within the memory of living Englishmen, had been resolved with miraculous rapidity and completeness. "Revolution" in Ulster, on which the Germans had so fondly banked, vanished as effectually as if it had never raised its head. "We will ourselves defend the coasts of Ireland," declared John Redmond in the House of Commons in a speech which will never die, "and I say to the Government that they may to-morrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland." Mrs.

Pankhurst, freshly released from a periodical hunger-striking sojourn in Brixton jail, announced that the suffragettes had stacked arms and now knew only womankind's duty to England. That sent another Berlin dream careening into oblivion. "His Majesty's Loyal Opposition" proclaimed in Parliament through the mouth of the Conservative leader, Bonar Law, that the Government's political opponents were prepared to accord it "unhesitating support." In the Government itself the "Potsdam Party,"

as that relentless iconoclast, Leo Maxse, long termed the coterie which was for peace with Germany at almost any price, was either weeded out or suppressed. Lord Morley, the Lord President of the Council; "Honest John" Burns, still true to convictions, President of the Local Government Board, and Charles P. Trevelyan, Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Education, un.o.btrusively retired from Mr. Asquith's official family in consequence of their inability to sanction the war.

They have played their parts meantime with honorable consistency--by maintaining an hermetical silence on questions of the war. And finally, though primarily in popular judgment, Lord Haldane, the graduate of Gottingen, the translator of Schopenhauer and the admirer of German _Geist_, was driven by scandalized public opinion from the War Office, whither he had just come as an "a.s.sistant" to the Prime Minister, whose cabinet portfolio was the Secretarys.h.i.+p for War. Most of England sighed with thankful relief when the able Scotch lawyer and philosopher whom contemporary history accuses of responsibility for Britain's military unpreparedness, beat an ignominious retreat back to his regular post, the wool-sack, which, as Lord Chancellor, he by general consent conspicuously adorned. The country's relief became enthusiastic a.s.surance when the lawyer, Asquith, himself retired from the War Office, to make way for the soldier, Kitchener, who was recalled by telegram the day before from Dover, just as he was about to board s.h.i.+p for Cairo, to resume his duties as the ruler of Egypt. With the "Potsdam Party"

banished or made harmless, the Cabinet was now regarded as satisfactorily purged. The public heard with boundless gratification that the "strong men" of the Government--Grey, Lloyd-George and Churchill--had been uncompromisingly for war from the start as the only recourse compatible with British honor, to say nothing of the elementary dictates of self-preservation. It was at length possible for Mr.

Asquith to a.s.sure the country that he presided over an administration of whose unity of view and determination there was no shadow of a doubt--a Government which was resolved, as Sir Edward Grey's great speech in the House of Commons on August 3 set forth, to accomplish three cardinal purposes:

1. To protect the defenseless French coast against attack by the German navy;

2. To defend the integrity of Belgium; and

3. To put forth all Britain's strength and not run away from the obligations of honor and interest.