The Assault Part 11

When the events of the Great War, and perhaps the chief actors in it themselves, have pa.s.sed away, some British historian will almost certainly arise to tell the world the story--the "inside story"--of how Mr. Asquith's cabinet, through three days and nights of doubts, uncertainties, trials and tribulations, crossed the Rubicon to the sh.o.r.e of unanimity on the subject of British partic.i.p.ation. There were moments, beyond all question, when that issue hung perilously in the balance. The French Government's frantic eleventh-hour appeals for a decision in Downing Street are mute evidence of the vacillation which prevailed--a species of tentativeness which has never been missing from the British conduct of the purely diplomatic affairs of the war. The ministerial debates during which the die was cast in favor of war will make immortal reading, even if only a digest of them is all that is vouchsafed posterity. The "strong men" of the Government, if report is reliable, were called upon to fight valiantly and ceaselessly to avoid England's "running away from the obligations of honor and interest."

The tense interval which ensued while they were battering down the trenches of skepticism, chicken-heartedness and nonchalance among their Cabinet colleagues caused a delay which might easily have proved of fatal import; for the decision to throw the strength of the British army, as well as the navy, into the scales was under discussion, and it is conceivable that the Expeditionary Force, which it was eventually determined to send, might have been kept back for weeks, or even altogether, instead of the mere days its dispatch was actually r.e.t.a.r.ded.

Disaster incalculable would almost inevitably have resulted in that event.

The indispensable and all-governing preliminary measures for war in respect of domestic politics, the Government and the naval and military administration having thus been taken, equally radical precautions were invoked to put the nation's economic house in order. The Stock Exchange, following the lead of New York, Paris and Berlin, had shut down as early as July 31, in order that mere insensate panic on the part of the speculative and investing world might not degenerate into irretrievable rout. War having descended with irresistible suddenness during the "week-end" preceding the traditional August Bank Holiday (Monday, the 3rd), a meeting of great financiers in the Bank of England on the holiday itself decided to prolong it, as far as banks and bankers were concerned, for three days, _i.e._, until Friday, the 7th, in what turned out to be the well-grounded hope that public excitement would meantime subside and prevent "runs" ruinous alike to banks and depositors. A moratorium was established. The Bank discount-rate, which had already vaulted from four to eight per cent., was now raised to ten, an unheard-of figure, which effectually curbed the l.u.s.t of persons anxious to profit from war abnormalities or otherwise indulge in operations not consistent with the gravity of the hour.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Germans Anxious to Fly from England. Remarkable scenes were witnessed outside the American Consulate, thousands of Germans clamoring for pa.s.sage back to Germany.]

It was mainly these things--wholesome, substantial proofs that their rulers had grappled with the situation with bold initiative that inspired the people of London with rea.s.surance, which, diluted with the stoicism of the British character, became calm confidence Gibraltar-like in its inflexibility. She had "the men," England was saying; she had "the s.h.i.+ps," and, Parliament having voted an initial war fund of one hundred million pounds as unconcernedly as if it were a thousand-pounds grant for a new switch-track at Woolwich a.r.s.enal, she unmistakably had "the money," too.

But even more self-comforting, if possible, than this iron trust in her own inexhaustible resources was England's conviction in the invincibility of her Allies. Was not even little Belgium holding back the flower of the German army before Liege? Even in the unlikely event of Liege's fall, would not the impregnable fortress of Namur provide Krupp guns with a still tougher nut to crack? Those were, alas! the hours in which the existence of the forty-two-centimeter siege gun was not even mooted in ostrich England. France? The Germans would find a vastly different antagonist awaiting them this time in the Ardennes, the Vosges pa.s.ses and along the Meuse and the Sambre. There was a "New France," a France of _elan_ and iron. It was the virile Republic of Poincare, Delca.s.se, Joffre, Bleriot, Pegoud and Carpentier, with which the Prussian hosts must this time measure lances, not the degenerate Empire of the third Napoleon, which crumbled at Sedan and Metz and surrendered Paris. Russia? "Can't you just hear the steam-roller rumbling across East Prussia and thundering at the gates of Berlin?" a great English peer asked me, in all seriousness, during my first week in London. "Isn't the tread of the Czar's countless millions, pounding remorselessly toward the west, almost audible?" he persisted. Millions of Englishmen were thinking and saying the same thing. As for the German army, almost as many of them were convinced that that "over-organized, peace-stale" military establishment, which was a magnificent spectacle on parade, but lacked leaders experienced in modern campaigning, would crash to pieces not only against "superior numbers" but against Allied troops and commanders who had been fighting great wars this past quarter of a century in Africa and Asia. London's feelings toward Germany seemed, indeed, almost compa.s.sionate. Many people, otherwise sane, talked about the war being over by Christmas.

The Kaiser's navy would come out and be smashed, they calculated, and such work as had not already been accomplished by the Allied armies within the Fatherland's eastern and western frontiers would soon be completed by "internal collapse," industrial stagnation, national impoverishment and universal starvation. Poor Germany! She had brought it on herself. Her end, after a peace soon to be dictated in Berlin, would manifestly be speedy and annihilating. The Social Democrats, it was true, were bamboozled into support of the war by fict.i.tious a.s.surances that the sword had been "forced" into Germany's unwilling and blameless hand, but the scales would presently fall from their eyes, and then woe betide whatever remained of the Hohenzollerns' ravished, defenseless realm! Street-hawkers in the Strand were selling blatant copies--a penny each--of _The Kaiser's Last Will and Testament_. Would William II be sent to St. Helena, like the other Napoleon, or be interned in some more accessible point in the British Empire, to pa.s.s the remaining days of his humiliation and remorse? And the "Crown Prince" with him, of course. These were the reveries of Britain in the early days of August, 1914. Nothing disturbed them except the creaking and the rumbling of the Russian steam-roller. Those being dulcet reverberations, John Bull paused eagerly in the midst of his musings to let them lull him into a still deeper siesta of optimism....

Serene and imperturbable as the vast majority of Englishmen were, the responsible leaders of the nation were under no delusions as to the magnitude of the task now confronting them. To the country's intense astonishment, though Lord Roberts had been dinning it in their ears incessantly for at least five years previous, England found itself in a state of practical impotence as far as effective partic.i.p.ation in modern large-scale military operations was concerned. In the same five minutes during which Parliament voted one hundred million pounds as a first war credit, it also sanctioned an increase of the British army by five hundred thousand men. At that moment the Home military establishment, which was immediately mobilized as "The British Army Expeditionary Force" when England decided to enter the war with her soldiers as well as her sailors, consisted of eight divisions of all arms--roundly, one hundred fifty thousand men. An organization of another half-million troops, officered and equipped for a great Continental campaign, could not be stamped out of the ground. Its production, even in a country with the glorious military traditions of England, was manifestly fraught with stupendous difficulties. There was no mistrust of British patriotism; but when men recalled the futility of Lord Roberts' efforts to implant in England's conscience the necessity of some form of National Service--how he not only failed, but was ridiculed and vilified for pursuing his sagacious crusade in the face of merciless rebuff--and when inherent British repugnance to "soldiering" and even to wearing uniforms was remembered, there were widespread misgivings.

Prussian militarism long filled me with abhorrence. I had learned to detest it not as an inst.i.tution, but for its numerous disgusting manifestations, princ.i.p.ally the arrogance of its gilded popinjays and the brutal and overweening contempt in which their traditions and training taught them to hold mere civilian microbes. Yet in those frantic hours when hopelessly unready military England was compelled to patch up an army for battle against the world's most scientific war-machine, I pondered what a blessing a little "militarism" would have been for the British democracy. I had seen Germany trooping off to war, singing, cheering and flower-garnished; and I knew that her debonair demeanor was due less to l.u.s.t for the fray--the great ma.s.s of the nation was animated by no such sentiment as that--than to the realization, which sprang from immutable facts and numbers, that her citizen army was equal to almost any emergencies it would be called upon to meet.

Germany was a nation in arms. England was a nation in difficulties.

How grotesquely unprepared to play a commensurate part in a military war, compared to her Continental allies and foes, this table showing the size of the various armies indicates:

Peace footing War footing Guns

Great Britain ............... 234,000 380,000 1,000 Austria-Hungary ............. 500,000 2,200,000 2,500 France (including Algeria) .. 790,000 4,000,000 4,200 Germany ..................... 850,000 6,000,000 5,500 Russia ...................... 1,700,000 7,000,000 6,000

Lord Kitchener was obviously the man of the hour. An organizer primarily, rather than a strategist, tactician or field-marshal, his appointment to the War Secretarys.h.i.+p demonstrated that whoever was responsible for it--men say it was Lord Northcliffe--recognized instantly the all-overshadowing requirement: a recruiting sergeant.

Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief, would necessarily retain the supreme direction of the Allied forces operating against the German front in France and Belgium. England's part was to send him men. And the one to find, drill and equip them was unmistakably Kitchener of Khartum, South Africa, India and Egypt, the "organizer" of victory against the fuzzy-wuzzies and the Boers, the disciplinarian who had galvanized the Indian army into new life, and the administrator who was licking Egypt into Imperial shape. There would be time enough for the war itself to produce another Wellington or Roberts. What was needed now was men, rifles and guns, cartridges, sh.e.l.ls and uniforms, war-planes, motor-lorries and hospital-trains and all the other innumerable impedimenta of modern man-killing. The summoning to the task of the big bluff soldier who first saw the light in County Kerry, who was looked upon as the incarnation of initiative and relentless efficiency, and who had proved his right so to be considered, was elementary and inevitable.

It was work for a "sergeant-major" and a "drill-sergeant" rather than for a Napoleonic genius; and when England learned that "K.," as he is affectionately known in the army, was on the prodigious job, England took heart. She responded with a will to his first appeal for men. The h.o.a.rdings of the Kingdom were plastered with it on the morning of August 8. It read as follows:

+------------------------------------------------------------------+ YOUR KING AND COUNTRY NEED YOU. A CALL TO ARMS An addition of 100,000 men to his Majesty's Regular Army is immediately necessary in the present grave National Emergency. Lord Kitchener is confident that this appeal will be at once responded to by all those who have the safety of our Empire at heart. TERMS OF SERVICE General Service for a period of 3 years or until the war is concluded. Age of Enlistment between 19 and 30. HOW TO JOIN Full information can be obtained at any Post Office in the Kingdom or at any Military depot. G.o.d SAVE THE KING! +------------------------------------------------------------------+

In the past England's volunteer army had been maintained by a recruiting system which produced, on the average, about thirty-five thousand new men a year. They did not come easily, even in halcyon peace times, and the gaily-caparisoned recruiting-sergeant in Trafalgar Square, who would b.u.t.tonhole a hundred likely "Tommies" in a day, earned well his fee if he succeeded in inducing ten of them to "take the s.h.i.+lling." It remained to be seen if "the present grave National Emergency" would find dormant in Britain military talent and inclination hitherto undreamt of.

In the opening flush of the excitement and enthusiasm which the war engendered, Lord Kitchener's hopes were satisfactorily realized.

Recruiting-offices in numerous districts were literally stormed. The response from the middle, "upper-middle" and upper cla.s.ses was particularly buoyant. Duke, peer, aristocrat, n.o.bleman, "nut," banker, lawyer, doctor, merchant, teacher and clerk came forward splendidly.

But artisan, docker and miner lagged. The lower cla.s.s revealed an inclination to continue to throng the public-houses rather than the recruiting-offices. It seemed evident at the outset that it was not they who were bent on saving England. They gave disquieting indication that their sort of patriotism was primarily individual self-preservation, that for them, love of country began at home. A waking-up process in their unenlightened ranks was destined to come to pa.s.s, thanks mainly to "separation allowances" for missus and the kids, but it was never to attain the dimensions of a rousing which extorted from their atrophied intelligence even an approximate appreciation of their obligations or their country's peril. Britain's war is being waged, as it will be won--speaking broadly--by the patriotism and blood of the excoriated upper ten thousand. The struggle had been in progress for more than a year, at a cost of nearly five hundred thousand British casualties, when it was still necessary for Lloyd-George to remind working-cla.s.s England, in as unqualified language as a politician dare speak to the nation's electoral masters, that it was not doing its full duty.

While Britain at large still hugged the delusion of easy victory, in grotesque underestimation of the enemy's power, and while Kitchener's recruit-finding machinery was being put in vigorous motion, the War Office, in co-operation with the navy, was accomplis.h.i.+ng as magnificent a piece of military work as army annals hold--the silent landing of the British Expeditionary Force of one hundred and sixty thousand men, with its full complement of horses, guns and stores, on the sh.o.r.es of France.

That feat will live as immortal disproof of the charge popular in the United States that "hustle" is a word which is conspicuously missing from the British lexicon. Compared to it, our "hustle" in landing an army in Cuba in 1898 was the quintessence of procrastination and muddle.

The British railways had been taken over by the Government coincident with the arrival of war, an "Executive Committee" consisting of the General Managers of the main companies having been established more than a year previous as an advisory council for such an emergency as had now supervened. Embarkation of the Expeditionary Force commenced on the night of August 7th. Admiral Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, a.s.sured Lord Kitchener that the channel pa.s.sage was as safe as the Thames itself. The British public, receiving its first lesson in relentless censors.h.i.+p of war news, was kept so effectually in the dark as to the dispatch of the largest army which ever left English sh.o.r.es that it knew nothing whatever of it till the host was at its destination, with b.r.e.a.s.t.s bared to the foe. The landing of Sir John French's legions on the soil of France was accomplished, complete in every detail, by August 17th.

British railways, when the record of that marvel of transportation is compiled, will share the honors with the ironclads of Britain's navy and the liners of her mercantile marine. Southampton being the main port of departure, the performance of the London and Southwestern Railway, which has carried so many thousand Americans in pacific days from Waterloo Station to the s.h.i.+p's side, is a case in point. I heard Sir H. A.

Walker, the "Southwestern's" general manager make before the American Luncheon Club in London the first announcement of the railways' part in England's military mobilization. With his subsequent permission, I was privileged to give the British public its first information on that subject. The L. & S. W. had been a.s.signed the task of making ready for dispatch to Southampton within sixty hours three hundred and fifty trains of thirty cars each. It did the trick in forty-five hours.

During the first three weeks of war there were dispatched to and unloaded at the s.h.i.+ps' sides seventy-three of such trains every fourteen hours. They arrived from the four quarters of the kingdom, and none of them was late. "I come from the land of 'big railway stunts,'" said Henry W. Thornton, the American general manager of the Great Eastern railway when Sir H. A. Walker had told this convincing story of British "hustle." "We think we are 'pulling off' some feat when we handle G.A.R. encampments and national conventions, but what British railways accomplished in the ten days between August 7 and 17 last may fairly be claimed as a unique record in railway history." What Mr. Thornton modestly failed to add was that he himself, as a colleague presently bore testimony, had played a conspicuous role in the drama of British military mobilization. Certain inanimate things, almost as well known to Americans as Mr. Thornton, played big parts, too. The palatial _Mauretania_, with her _suites de-luxe_ battered into cargo-room for Tommy Atkins, and her big new sister, _Aquitania_, with only a maiden crossing or two to her credit, similarly knocked to pieces, made incessant trips back and forth between Southampton and other channel ports to Dieppe, Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk, landing in France on each occasion no less than five thousand British fighting-men, ready for death and glory.

Each mother's son of them carried with him this little personal message from Lord Kitchener:

"You are ordered abroad as a soldier of the King to help our French comrades against the invasion of a common enemy. You have to perform a task which will need your courage, your energy, your patience.

"Remember that the honour of the British army depends on your individual conduct. It will be your duty, not only to set an example of discipline and perfect steadiness under fire, but also to maintain the most friendly relations with those whom you are helping in this struggle.

The operations in which you are engaged will, for the most part, take place in a friendly country, and you can do your own country no better service than in showing yourself in France and Belgium in the true character of a British soldier.

"Be invariably courteous, considerate, and kind. Never do anything likely to injure or destroy property, and always look upon looting as a disgraceful act. You are sure to meet with a welcome, and to be trusted; your conduct must justify that welcome and that trust. Your duty can not be done unless your health is sound. So keep constantly on your guard against any excesses. In this new experience you may find temptations in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations, and, while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.

"Do your duty bravely.

"Fear G.o.d.

"Honour the King.

"KITCHENER, Field-Marshal."

I remained in England only a week after my arrival from Germany. Part of the time had been pleasantly spent editing a special "American edition" of _The Times_ for Lord Northcliffe, who placed the full machinery of his journalistic organization at the disposal of the "Yankee War Refugees." He was only prevented from extending them the hospitality of Sutton Place, his lovely estate in Surrey, now a hospital, for a "week-end" outing by the inability of the railways to guarantee the necessary special train facilities. To my astonishment but unalloyed delight Lord Northcliffe "ordered" me to take a month's vacation in the United States. He thought my family and kinsmen would like to have a look at an "English spy," fresh from Germany, before the earmarks of his nefarious trade had entirely evaporated, and so, having obtained the last bunk left on that veteran Cunard hulk, _S.S.

Campania_, which had brought my wife and me to Europe on our honeymoon voyage, I sailed away from Liverpool on Sat.u.r.day, August 15th, along with twelve hundred or fifteen hundred other sardines packed in an eighteen-knot steel box.

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 pa.s.sengers.

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 c.o.c.ked 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 lavis.h.i.+ng "good United States dollars" on Europe, and this was her grat.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+p'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 gnas.h.i.+ng 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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_ pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sed 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 pet.i.tion 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 grat.i.tude 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 lights.h.i.+p. Asked by the s.h.i.+p'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 pa.s.sengers--Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, British Amba.s.sador at Was.h.i.+ngton, and his colleague of France, the cultured Monsieur Jusserand. They had crossed in impenetrable incognito.

Not only were their names missing from the pa.s.senger-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 n.o.body during seven whole days and nights ever heard of them or saw them, or, what is vastly more miraculous aboard-s.h.i.+p, 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 bra.s.s band. The British and French Amba.s.sadors 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 Amba.s.sadors 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 Amba.s.sador, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 Emba.s.sy 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 amba.s.sador 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 s.h.i.+pment 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 circ.u.mstances 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 att.i.tude the _New York Times_ has taken up."