The Assault Part 9

After _Legationsrat_ Esternaux had fired this high-explosive, he ushered me out, and I knocked on _Legationsrat_ Heilbron's door, fifteen yards farther down the pa.s.sageway. Fur-mittens and ear-m.u.f.fs are not _de rigueur_ in northern Germany in midsummer, but I should have worn them that afternoon of August 5, for the reception awaiting me at Heilbron's hands was of arctic frigidity. It was a vastly changed Heilbron from the obliging functionary who had pressed upon me, forty-eight hours previous, copies of the German White Paper, in order that I might spread the official truth about "how the Fatherland had worked to prevent the war" broadcast in England and the United States. It was also a strangely less courteous _Legationsrat_ than the one (Esternaux) whose presence I had just quitted.

"_Herr Legationsrat_," I began, "I have come to ask you for an _Ausweiskarte_. You know, I suppose, of my little experience last night. I am quite willing to take my chances with the mob, but I ought to have something to protect me from the excesses of the police."

"Mobs are mobs," he rejoined. "I can do nothing for you."

"That is strange," I interposed. "Surely you know that the American Amba.s.sador has arranged for my remaining in Germany?"

"I know nothing about that whatever," said Heilbron.

"Well, _Legationsrat_ Esternaux does," I retorted, "because he told me so not five minutes ago, and he said you would issue the necessary credentials."

Heilbron, who like all German bureaucrats has the backbone of a crushed worm in the presence of superior authority, or the mere suggestion of it, now reached for his telephone-receiver and asked to be connected with somebody in the Foreign Office. He repeated the object of my call to whomever was at the other end of the line, nodded in a.s.sent to something apparently said to him, then turned to me:

"It is just as I thought. The Foreign Office can do nothing for you.

If you want credentials, you must apply to the police."

"But, _Herr Legationsrat_," I persisted, "there can be no objection to your giving me something which will insure me ordinary safety at such a time as this. After all, I'm an American."

With a shrug of the shoulders and outflung arms, a German gesture expressing indifference or helplessness, or both, Heilbron observed, sardonically: "For us you are a _Daily Mail_ man--nothing else. You are known everywhere as such. Certainly if you remain here, your position will undoubtedly be a precarious one."

It was plain that the ethics which impelled Von Bethmann Hollweg to tear up the Belgian "sc.r.a.p of paper"--brazen disregard of pledges--were now being pursued in my very insignificant case. The German Foreign Secretary had given a formal undertaking, as I understood it, as to the inviolability of my personal and professional status as an American newspaper man. Not five minutes before, I had been a.s.sured by an official of the German Foreign Office in the Foreign Office that the latter was fully aware of the arrangements which Mr. Gerard had effected in my favor. And now another official calmly denied its existence, and, moreover, declared in substance that a United States pa.s.sport calling upon the friendly German Government "to permit Frederic William Wile safely and freely to pa.s.s, and, in case of need, to give him all lawful aid and protection," was not worth the parchment on which it was engraved. International law was being refas.h.i.+oned in Berlin in a hurry.

Once again I was compelled to flee to the American Amba.s.sador for protection--reluctantly enough, for I had already usurped far more of his time than one citizen is ent.i.tled to. I told him that the German Foreign Office was trying to convert me into a man without a country; not only that, but that its cheerful intimation as to my "position"

being "undoubtedly precarious" rang clearly ominous in my ears. The Amba.s.sador shared that view. He was of the opinion, when he saw me earlier in the day, that my alarm was unwarranted. From what other American newspaper men had meantime reported, my fears seemed to be justified. He agreed that it was best that I should go--but how? The town was already choked with Americans waiting to "go." If it were impossible to move any of them across the frontier, what possible chance was there of exporting me? There was, of course, just one chance that I could think of--to leave next day with the British Emba.s.sy. The Amba.s.sador suggested that I should ask Sir Edward Goschen if he would take me, along with the purely British correspondents, who, I learned, were going in his train.

So now, the United States having obviously exhausted its powers on my behalf, I threw myself on the mercies of His Britannic Majesty. I found Sir Edward Goschen unhesitatingly responsive to my request, on the important condition that the German authorities would permit a non-Englishman to accompany a safe-conduct party of British subjects of highly official character! Once again the gates leading out of Germany seemed barred to me, for my status at the German Foreign Office, as the afternoon had established, was not exactly that of a _persona grata_ who had but to ask a favor to have it granted. But, by an act of Providence, as it then and always since has seemed to me, Amba.s.sador Gerard strolled into the lobby of the British Emba.s.sy while I was in the midst of conversation with Sir Edward Goschen. The British Amba.s.sador repeated the conditions on which he would gladly rescue me--the a.s.sent of the German Government--whereupon Mr. Gerard quietly remarked that he would "look after that." He had little notion, I suppose, of the herculean effort which would be necessary to give effect to his words.

It was now past six o'clock. The British Emba.s.sy train was timed to leave Berlin at seven next morning, Thursday, August 6. If anything was going to be done for me, all concerned realized that it would have to be done soon. "Go home, pack up all you can jam into two suit-cases, and turn up at the American Emba.s.sy at nine o'clock," said Gerard.

No home was ever deserted, I am sure, more reluctantly or so precipitately as my little _menage_ in Wilmersdorf. It seemed a woefully inglorious ending to thirteen very happy and fruitful years in Berlin. I thanked Heaven that my wife and little boy were not there to be evicted with me. A woman's attachment to the things which have spelled home--the books, the pictures, the thousand and one household trinkets, enshrined with priceless value to those who have acc.u.mulated them--is far stronger than a man's. The wrench of separation would have been correspondingly harder to bear. In the midst of such reveries, sandwiched between selecting the most essential contents for the two suit-cases to which I was limited, I had a caller.

"_Herr Direktor_ Kretschmar, of the Hotel Adlon, has come to see you,"

announced _Fraulein_.

Kretschmar is probably known to more American travelers to Europe than any other hotel man on the Continent. The Adlon had been Yankee headquarters in Berlin ever since its opening in the autumn of 1907.

Old man Adlon, its genial founder and proprietor, he of the arc-light face at midnight, after a liberal evening's libations o'er the flowing bowl, used to be fond of a.s.suring people that "_mein lieber Freund Wile_" had "made" the Adlon. If telling people that the Adlon was the best hotel in Berlin, and reporting in my American dispatches, as necessity required, that Governor Herrick, Mr. Carnegie, Mr. Schwab, Doctor David Jayne Hill, Vice-President Fairbanks, Theodore P. Shonts, John Hays Hammond, Otto H. Kahn or some other famous fellow citizen was lodged in the marble and bronze caravansary at the head of _Unter den Linden_--if this "made" the Adlon--I plead guilty to Herr Adlon's charge. I shall never do it again. I divined at once the object of the curly-haired Kretschmar's visit. Having graduated, I believe, like many eminent German hotel keepers, from the humble ranks of hall-porters and head waiters, he was a past master in obsequious servility. Many a time I had seen him bow and sc.r.a.pe like a grinning flunky as he welcomed the arriving or sped the parting guest at the Adlon, but never was he so cringing a Kretschmar as he stood before me now. He got down to business without delay.

There had been a "terrible mistake" at the hotel the night before. He was there to offer the "deepest regret" of both the elder and junior _Herren Adlon_ that their "best friend" should have been the victim of "such an outrage" on their premises. They had dismissed no less than ten members of the hotel staff for complicity in my arrest. The Adlon hoped, from the bottom of its unoffending heart, that I would "forgive and forget." Kretschmar, at this point in his _peccavi_, almost broke down. He was in tears, and, if I had let him, he would probably have gone down on his knees. If I had known what I was told next day as to his own connection with my experience at the Adlon, he would not only have gone down on his knees, but down the stairs of my flat-building as well. Whether it was he who incited the page-boys, desk-clerks, elevator-men, chambermaids and waiters to regard me as an "English spy"

I can not say, but, in light of the experience which a colleague, Alexander Muirhead, a London newspaper-photographer, had in the Adlon shortly after my arrest, there is at least ground to fear that Kretschmar may have been something more than an innocent bystander.

"When I asked for you at the desk," Muirhead told me, "a supercilious clerk, eying me fiercely, referred me to the manager, whereupon I was escorted into Kretschmar's room. 'I've come to see my friend Wile,' I explained. 'Your friend Wile's a spy!' snarled Kretschmar, who seemed beside himself with fury. 'And he's now where he ought to be! As for you, _mein Herr_, stand there against the wall, hold up your arms, and be searched for weapons. For all we know, you're a spy, too!' The mere thought of your name appeared to fill Kretschmar with incontrollable rage. Having satisfied himself that I had nothing more explosive about me than some undeveloped films, he allowed me to go my way amid incoherent mutterings and imprecations about that '---- of a ---- spy, Wile.' I was, of course, completely mystified by this extraordinary episode, as I was at that time entirely ignorant of your fate."

Muirhead is a plain-spoken Scotchman, as well as one of Europe's bravest and most famous "camera men," and although the lachrymose Kretschmar indignantly repudiates the occurrence, I hope he will not mind if I prefer to believe Muirhead. The manager of the Adlon still keeps my memory green. Periodically during the war, whenever some German paper has outdone itself in dignifying me with vile abuse, Kretschmar has faithfully marked it in blue pencil and sent it to me by two routes--Switzerland and Holland--to make sure that it reached me. As I have not taken the trouble to acknowledge these little tokens of his abiding interest, I hope he may learn from these pages that they have been duly received and fill not the least conspicuous niche in my chamber of German war horrors.

A weepy good-by scene with _Fraulein_, a parting, lingering look around my beloved _Arbeitszimmer_--so soon to be ransacked by the German police--an undying vow from the little woman to guard our Lares and Penates as if they were her own last earthly possessions, and all was at an end, so far as my habitat in Berlin was concerned. It has not been my privilege to say farewell to fireside and dear ones and then leave for the front in field-gray or khaki, but no soldier-man anywhere in this war has torn himself away from home ties more sorrowfully than I turned my back in the gathering dusk of August 5, 1914, on dear old Helmstedter-stra.s.se. Instinctively I felt that I should never see it again, and my heart was heavy.

"What's Baron von Stumm got against you?" asked Second Secretary Harvey, smilingly, at the American Emba.s.sy, when I arrived, bag and baggage, at nine o'clock. "He says you're not an American." Stumm was the chief of the Anglo-American section of the German Foreign Office. He knew perfectly well that I am an American. He had entertained me at his own table in May, 1910, when he gave a luncheon-party in honor of the American newspaper correspondents stationed in Berlin and those traveling with Mr. Roosevelt on the occasion of the Colonel's visit to the Kaiser. Stumm had "nothing against me" in June, I explained to Harvey, because of his own sweet volition he distinguished me with a call at my hotel during Kiel Regatta. I could not imagine what had suddenly come over the scion of the humble Westphalian blacksmith's house, which was one of the first of the _nouveau riche_ German industrial tribes to be enn.o.bled. I could only think that, like the Berlin police, _Legationsrat_ Heilbron, _Herr Direktor_ Kretschmar and nearly all other Germans, Stumm had temporarily gone mad. If I was "not an American," it had taken the Imperial German Foreign Office thirteen years to make the discovery. Some day I am going to send Stumm a Christmas card. It will be embellished with a gilded birth-certificate attested by the clerk of the County of La Porte, Indiana.

No one supplied me with the details of the final negotiations which were necessary to induce the German Government graciously to consent to permit me to leave Germany alive. I have since learned that my pa.s.s was not secured without some extremely forcible remonstrances and representations. Stumm had denounced me as a "scoundrel" and in other knightly terms. Why the German Foreign Office so ardently desired to prevent my departure, after having earlier in the same day declined to promise me immunity from physical harm, is a mystery which I trust it may some day elucidate. To fathom it is beyond my own feeble powers of divination, and in this narrative of farewell tribulations in the Fatherland, I have confined myself strictly to facts. I have resolutely not yielded to the temptation to surmise. But as the official Genesis of Armageddon is not likely to honor me with mention, I have presumed to set forth my own diminutive part in it with perhaps a tiring superfluity of detail. I have the more eagerly ventured to do so because grotesque versions of the "terms" on which I, an American citizen, if you please, "secured permission to leave Germany," have been, and still are, for all I know, in circulation in Berlin. They are believed--and that is the one saddening thought they inspire in me--by people who were once my friends, among them Americans who place bread-and-b.u.t.ter business necessities and social expediency in Germany above the elementary dictates of grat.i.tude and personal loyalty, which are traits one encounters even in a _Dachshund_. It is these insufferable lickers of German bootheels who "have heard" that I "gave my word of honor" to seal my lips forever "about Germany," to "go back to the United States at once" (perhaps as press-agent to Dernburg, who was also leaving Germany), to "renounce all connection with English journalism," and other pledges of equally imbecilic character. The only "broken pledge"

which the rumor-mongers did not foist upon me was an outright agreement to join Germany's army of kept journalists. I should have been better off, financially no doubt, if I had enlisted in that immaculate service, which is one of the best paid in the world.

My permit to leave Germany, Harvey said, would be issued during the night and be handed me next morning at the British Emba.s.sy. Meantime, evidently to make a.s.surance doubly sure, Amba.s.sador Gerard gave me in his own handwriting an attest that I was leaving the country with Sir Edward Goschen. He affixed to it the great seal of the Emba.s.sy, handed me the note with a merry "Good luck," I wrung his hand in a last grip of grat.i.tude and good-by, and we parted company.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Amba.s.sador Gerard's Note]

Meantime I had opened negotiations with the Emba.s.sy porter to pa.s.s the night on a cot in his lodge, where Tower had bunked after our arrest, and arranged with him to call me at four-thirty, so that I could be at the British Emba.s.sy well before six o'clock. While I was chatting in the hallway, Mrs. Gerard came along. "Where are you going to sleep to-night?" she inquired, solicitously. I told her. She would not hear of my lodging plans in the porter's bas.e.m.e.nt. There were half-a-dozen bedrooms in the Emba.s.sy, and I must use one of them. Then she hustled away, in the most motherly fas.h.i.+on, to prepare for me what turned out to be a _suite-de-luxe_. My last night in Germany was slept on "American soil." It was not the most restful night I have spent in my life, but it lingers as the sweetest memory I cherish among a myriad of recollections which crowded thick one upon another in that great wild week in Berlin. "And do you like your breakfast eggs boiled three or four minutes?" was the cheery "Good night" and _Auf Wiedersehen_ I had from "Molly" Gerard.

At least one German, in addition to my secretary and governess, who were models of devotion to the last, took the trouble to show me a parting mark of esteem. He was a colleague, Paul R. Krause, of the _Lokal-Anzeiger_ staff, a son-in-law of Field Marshal von der Goltz, and one of the best of fellows. Krause lived abroad so long--his life has been spent mostly in Turkey, South Africa and South America--that he will perhaps not mind my saying that he always struck me as effectually de-Germanized. At any rate, having heard of my plight, he came to the Emba.s.sy late at night to offer me not only fraternal sympathy, but physical a.s.sistance in the form of readiness to become my "body-guard,"

if I really considered myself in personal danger! He could hardly be made to believe that Heilbron had been "such an a.s.s," when I told of my parting interview in the Foreign Office. Krause and I exchanged _Auf Wiedersehen_ in the "American bar" of the Hotel Kaiserhof, round the corner from the Emba.s.sy, where I noticed Doctor Dernburg, August Stein, of the _Frankfurter Zeitung_, and Doctor Fuchs, of the Deutsche Bank, gathered dolefully round a beer-table, and amazed, no doubt, to find Krause in such doubtful company.

I did not seek my downy couch in the Emba.s.sy until I had had a farewell promenade and visit with two very dear newspaper pals, Swing, of the _Chicago Daily News_, and Feibelman, of the _New York Tribune_ and _London Express_. Feibelman was still in the throes of the anxiety from which I was about to be relieved, as the Foreign Office had also refused him credentials owing to his connection with an English journal. He sincerely envied my good fortune in being able to escape with the British Amba.s.sador. I was glad to hear a week later that he too had eventually contrived, with the American Emba.s.sy's a.s.sistance, to reach Holland, where he has done excellent work for his paper during the war.

Swing, Feibelman and I, arm-locked, walked the silent streets around and about the Emba.s.sy until long past midnight, speculating as to what the red-clotted future had in store for each of us, embittered at Fate for so ruthlessly disrupting friends.h.i.+ps of affectionate intimacy, and wondering, when all was over, if it ever would be, whether Berlin or Kamchatka would be the scene of our next reunion....

Something told me that even a twelfth-hour attempt might be made to hamper my get-away, so, as a "positively last farewell" favor I asked "Joe" Grew, my rescuer from the police, to escort me to the train.

Though it meant his tumbling out of bed at the unromantic hour of five, his breezy "Sure, I will" set my mind completely at rest. He arrived at the appointed minute. The sight of the Stars and Stripes flapping at the front of his car was a rea.s.suring little picture. They had meant much to me during the preceding forty-eight hours. At the British Emba.s.sy, which looked more like a baggage-room or express-office struck by lightning, with the floors littered indiscriminately with hastily-packed boxes of doc.u.ments and records, trunks, suit-cases, golf-bags and batches of clothing hastily slung or strapped into or around traveling-rugs--and all the other indescribable impedimenta of a suddenly-retreating army or an evicted family--I found my German pa.s.s awaiting me. It had been delivered to G.o.dfrey Thomas, one of Sir Edward Goschen's able young attaches, all of whom, like the Amba.s.sador himself, had given so characteristic an exhibition of British imperturbability during the final hours of crisis. The pa.s.s described me as "the English newspaper correspondent, Wile." It is reproduced opposite this page. I treasure it with the same pride which probably inspires a reprieved man to cherish the doc.u.ment which cheats the hangman.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Facsimile of the Pa.s.s]

There was no guard of honor to bid Sir Edward Goschen and his staff G.o.dspeed from the Wilhelmstra.s.se. No single German was so poor as to do them reverence except a couple of sleepy policemen and half-a-dozen blear-eyed, early-rising Berliners on their way to work. None of them had yet learned to say _Gott strafe England_, so the lonely cavalcade of luggage-laden taxis, which were hauling Great Britain's official representatives on the first stage of their journey out of the enemy's capital, proceeded on its way without molestation or demonstration.

The very day the Kaiser's amba.s.sador to England, Prince Lichnowsky, was accorded a departure from London amid honors customarily reserved for a ruling sovereign. Great Britain's amba.s.sador to Germany was leaving like a thief in the night, the Imperial Government having requested him, when shaking the dust of Berlin from his miscreant feet, to slink to the railway station as inconspicuously as possible and long before the righteous metropolis waked. Otherwise, it was solicitously suggested, _Kultur_, giving vent to the holy venom which now filled the Teutonic soul, might feel constrained to stone the Amba.s.sador afresh. Thus, I, too, chaperoned by Grew, sneaked out of Berlin.

My old German teacher was right. She said there was no word for "gentleman" in the Kaiser's language. The fas.h.i.+on in which his people went to war with England proved it.

CHAPTER XII

SAFE CONDUCT

Lehrter Bahnhof, the gateway through which so many American tourists have pa.s.sed out of Berlin en route to Hamburg or Bremen steamers, was not _en fete_ in honor of the departing _Englander_. My memory traveled back irresistibly to the last time the British Emba.s.sy in force was a.s.sembled there--to greet King George and Queen Mary when they arrived to visit the German Court in May, 1913. The rafters rang on that occasion with the blare of a Prussian Guards band thundering _G.o.d Save the King_, cousins George and William embraced fondly and kissed, and the station was swathed in the entwined colors of Germany and England.

It was a different and forbidding aspect which the old brick and steel barn of a train-shed presented this muggy August morning. At every entrance sentries in gray and policemen with Brownings at the belt stood guard, for railways and stations were now as integral a part of the war-machine as fortresses and guns. Inside, infantrymen in gray from head to foot--all Germany had now grown gray--carrying rifles with fixed bayonets patrolled the platforms, searching each Englishman, as he came along, with glances mingling watchfulness and contempt.

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

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

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

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

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

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