Ten Years Near the German Frontier: A Retrospect and a Warning

We all know that London was an unfortified city. Read this, from the Evangelische-lutherische Kirchenzeitung, written in 1915. It is an answer to the truthful charge that children, helpless women, old men, civilians going quietly about their business, had been slaughtered by the pitiless rain of death from the skies. The Danish Lutherans, among whom this pious sheet had been circulated with a view to exciting their sympathies, did not accept this.

'London has ceased to be a city without the defence of fortifications; it is filled with such numbers of aeroplanes and anti-aircraft guns, that, as we are all aware, the Zeppelins can attack it at night only. To attack London is to make an offensive on a den of murderers.'

'If you ask me,' says the Protestenblatt, Number 18, 'how shall I build up the kingdom of God,' my answer is: 'Be a good German! Stand fast by the Fatherland. Do your duty and fill your mission. Seek to submerge yourself in German spirit, in German mind. Be German in piety and will, which simply means, be true, faithful, and valiant. Help as best you can towards our victory; help to make our Fatherland grow and wax mighty.'11

It is true that there are Protestants in Germany who will not accept the 'Fatherland' as God and eternal life or as a life continued in the memories of later generations, as a Hessian peasant put it in a letter written from the Front. His attitude shows how barren all this rhetoric seems to the unhappy soldier who must obey. Those who knew the lives of truly religious Germans before the war must believe that these arrogant, feverish, diabolical utterances do not represent them. The Lutheran households where the fear of God and the love of one's neighbour reigned cannot have entirely disappeared; the old Christian spirit must fill some hearts. But here is a man, a Lutheran divine, whose pious books have 'circulated in the Army in millions of copies.' He is a very great clergyman; if you saw him in the streets of Lübeck, or Hamburg, or Berlin, many hats would be raised; even officers in the Army would greet him with respect. He is Geheimkonsistorialrath! 'Likewise,' he writes, in his book, Strong in the Lord– 'the blessings of the Reformation are at stake. Shall French ungodliness, shall Russian superstition, shall English hypocrisy rule the world? Never! For the blessing of our faith, for the freedom of our conscience, for our Germanism and for our Gospel, we shall fight and struggle and make every sacrifice. Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott. And, if the world were full of devils, we shall maintain our Empire!'

According to Dr. Conrad, Germany is a great surgeon. She must cut; she must even kill, if necessary, the nation that stands in the way of her beneficient Kultur!

So strenuously has the name of Martin Luther been made use of by these fanatics, that the fact is lost sight of in Germany, that the question is not one of religion. There is scarcely a war even in modern times with which religion had so little to do as this; but to hear these shriekers from the pulpit, one would think that Martin Luther was the instigator of the war and that the Kaiser is his prophet! What the Catholic population in Germany – in Bavaria, in Silesia – what the Jews in Berlin and Munich think of all this, we have not yet discovered. A Cardinal holding the standard of Luther, with two Rabbis gracefully toying with its gilded tassels is a sight the preachers offer to us when they appeal to Luther as the representative of Germany. Luther was no democrat; he would scarcely have approved of President Wilson's speeches; but yet he would not have worshipped the trinity of the Kaiser, the Crown Prince and the Prussian Holy Ghost as the Godhead!

Think of the tremendous force that must have perverted these 'men of God!' Who can help believing in the miracle of the swine driven into the sea after this, or in the old Latin adage, 'Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad,' or in Shakespeare's 'Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds?' Religion is made a mark to cover avarice and arrogant ambition, Christianity, to veil a god more material than the Golden Calf.

The learned Danes answered the shrieks of the preachers, and the specious reasonings of such scientists as Wilhelm von Bode, Wundt, Richard Dehmel, Wilhelm Röntgen, Ernest Haeckel, Sudermann, etc., with dead silence, erudition and art had been corrupted. 'In Italy,' Christopher Nyrop,12 the Dane, says, 'which, when the manifesto of the German learned appeared, was not among the belligerent States, the amazement and the disappointment were so great that the ninety-three signers, "representatives of German Kultur," were named Verräter der deutschen Kultur, traitors to German Kultur.' It was only necessary to change 'Vertreter' to 'Verräter.' And among them were Max Reinhart, Harnack, Gerhard Hauptmann, Siegfried Wagner!

The wonder and amazement were even greater when there was no protest from the Catholics or the Lutherans of Germany against the inexcusable outrage on Louvain or Rheims. The remonstrances of the Pope were unheeded. It was the policy of the German Government to suppress them as far as possible. It wanted to give the impression that the Holy Father was theirs, and too many thoughtless persons fell in with this idea. That the German Catholics were misinformed by Bethmann-Hollweg and the War Office makes their position worse.

The proofs offered by the Dean of the Cathedral of Rheims proved that this horror, the destruction of the sacred symbol of the French nation, was not 'a military necessity.'

CHAPTER IX

1910-1911-1912

The visits of Mr. John R. Mott to the Scandinavian countries were events; his was a name to conjure with. When an intimation of his coming appeared in the papers, our Legation was bombarded with requests for the opportunity of meeting him. 'We must,' my wife often said, 'make it understood that every American of good repute shall be welcome in our house; and it is our mission to give our Danish friends an opportunity to meet him.'

The Danes came to know this and, whenever there was an American in Copenhagen worth while – I do not mean merely having what is called 'social position' – we were always glad to arrange that the right persons should meet. We were not socially indiscriminate, but we were certainly eclectic. We wanted Mr. Mott for three meals a day, but he was always, like Martha, so busy about many things, that we could only secure him for a short breakfast or something like that, with one of his warmest admirers, Count Joachim Moltke, who is devoted to the moral improvement of young men, and Chamberlain and Madame Oscar O'Neill Oxholm. The only rift in the lute of the affection of certain Danish ladies for my wife was that she allowed Mr. Mott to leave Copenhagen on various occasions without 'making an occasion' for them to meet him. Among these ladies were Mademoiselle Wedel-Hainan, one of the ladies in-waiting to the Queen Dowager, and others interested in the cultivation of reverence for Christianity among their compatriots. The result of Mr. Mott's masterly work was shown when the war broke out. The 'red-blooded' who formerly looked at the Young Men's Christian Association as rather effeminate and effete must, in view of what it has done in Europe, forever close their lips.

At this time, in 1909, we had expectations of another visitor. Cardinal Gibbons almost promised to make the Northern trip; he would come to Copenhagen, it was intimated in a Baltimore newspaper. Great interest was shown among these agreeable Athenians, the cosmopolitan Danes. The question of etiquette bothered me; Sweden had still remote relations with the Holy See, though the Catholic religion is still practically proscribed in that country. At least, the King of Sweden writes, I think, a letter once a year to his 'cousin,' the Pope, or is it to his 'cousins,' the Cardinals; but Denmark, though very liberal since 1848 in its religious attitude, has not such vaguely official relations. I was informed that no Cardinal had visited Denmark since the Reformation. I made inquiries in the proper quarters at once. Of course, I might give Cardinal Gibbons his rank as a Prince of the Church, and even the most exalted who should go in after him at our dinner would be pleased. He could not come. His one hasty trip to Europe, after his friends had raised my hopes of his visiting us, was to be present at the Conclave that elected Benedict XV. Pius X. had died of a broken heart, and the heart of the Cardinal was sore and troubled at the horrors thrust upon the world. What he has done to fill our army and navy with courageous men contemporaneous history shows.

But the great visit, the epoch, which dulled even the glories of the coming of the Atlantic Squadron, was that of ex-President Roosevelt. To the Danes it was almost as if Holger Dansker, who, as everybody knows, is waiting in the vaults of Hamlet's castle at Elsinore to protect Denmark, had burst into the light.

From the European point of view, which took no account of our home politics, ex-President Roosevelt was not only the most important figure in America, but in the world, and the most picturesque. Even under the New Democracy, men will probably count more than nations in the minds of our brethren across the sea. However large collectiveness may loom in the future, there will be some man or other who will show above it, who will be a part greater than the whole. Mr. Roosevelt had made the Panama Canal possible; he had succeeded when De Lesseps had failed; he had forced, more than any other President before him, the respect of Europe; the Radicals wanted to greet him because he had curbed the power of the capitalists; kings and prime ministers welcomed him because they – even the Kaiser – feared his potentialities. That he would be the next President of the United States nobody in Europe doubted. These people were not welcoming, as they thought, a man like General Grant, who had merely done a great thing. The American who was coming was not only a man of splendid past, but one with a future that was rising up like thunder. You can imagine the excitement in Copenhagen when it was announced that he would pay that city a short visit. From Copenhagen he was to go to Christiania to make a Nobel Prize speech. The death of Björnson occurred just at this time; it was mourned in both Norway and Denmark as a national loss; but even this did not affect the reception of the ex-President.

'We would have rejoiced in our sorrow for nobody else,' the Norwegian Minister said.

King Frederick VIII. had made all his arrangements to go to the Riviera; his health was not good. He sent for me; he was doubtful whether the rumours of Mr. Roosevelt's visit were well founded or not.

'If he comes, this most distinguished citizen of yours, I will see that he is received with the greatest courtesy; I will do as much for him as if he were an Emperor. He and his family shall be given the Palace of Christian VII. during their stay. My son, the Crown Prince, will go to greet him; I regret, above all things, that I cannot be here.'

Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt came; he saw; he conquered, but Mrs. Roosevelt won all hearts. The young folks, Kermit and Ethel, fled from all gaieties and ceremonies and explored the town; if I remember they courted not the smiles of kings and princes; but they searched intensively for specimens of old pewter.

Mr. Roosevelt's trunks did not arrive in time; he and Mrs. Roosevelt were obliged to wear their travelling clothes. In the long history of court life in Denmark this had occurred only once on a gala occasion, and the guest had been Her Majesty the Queen of England, when she was Princess of Wales. She had accepted the result with the utmost simplicity. Mrs. Roosevelt, the ladies of the court said, was 'royal' in the charming way in which she accepted this unpleasant accident; she has contradicted practically the stories that American ladies have the plebeian habit of 'fussiness.' The Crown Princess declared that Mrs. Roosevelt was 'adorable,' and the Crown Prince referred to the pleasure of this visit nearly every time, during the last eight years, I met him. 'He is a Man,' he said.

The Marshal of the Court arranged the etiquette admirably, and there was not the slightest hitch. Some of my colleagues who knew that Mr. Roosevelt, as an ex-President, had no official rank, wondered how the technical details of the reception of a 'commoner' had been arranged. The Court and the Foreign Office offered all the courtesies usually bestowed on royal highnesses. The Legation and the Consulate were particularly proud of the decorations of the railway station, and grateful to the Minister of Commerce who was responsible for them.

As usual, Admiral de Richelieu was both thoughtful and generous. The best part of the programme, the voyage and breakfast on the Queen Maud– we went to Elsinore – and a hundred other agreeable details were arranged perfectly by him and Commander Cold, director of the Scandinavian-American Line.

A great dinner, such as only Danes can manage to perfect at short notice, was offered to him by the Mayor and the Municipality of Copenhagen. His speech was eagerly looked for. It charmed the Moderates; the extreme Socialists, who had claimed him for their own, were disappointed. 'Your Radicalism is our Conservatism,' said Chamberlain Carl O'Neill Oxholm.

Later, we heard that the Kaiser was disappointed in Mr. Roosevelt. This was from one of the Berlin court circles. Mr. Roosevelt (this was said sub rosa) had not been too Radical, but too frank. After all, there was no reason why a man who had represented the people of one of the greatest nations on earth should be too reverential to the All Highest!

When Mr. Roosevelt left Denmark, he left an impression of force, of virility, of dignity, of honesty that became part of the history of the country.

In 1911 Loubet, the French ex-President, came with his son Paul and a staff of delegates to the International Congress of Public and Private Charities. He was very genial and frank – qualities inherited by his son. His conversation was directed to the rapid reconstruction of France after 1870. 'A country that can do that has little to fear,' he said, 'if we can avoid the pitfalls of professional politicians. That may be our difficulty. Our enemies are glad that there should be dissensions among us, vital dissensions, not the healthy differences of opinion you have in your country.'

'Et "la revanche?"'

'Ah, Monsieur le Ministre,' answered one of his staff, 'how can he speak of that, with the German Minister, Mr. Waldhausen, so near us? He is beckoning to you now. It is not "revanche" we want, but the return of our territory. If that could be done without war! Paul, his son, will talk international politics with you, if you like. As to local politics, the Royalists do wrong in mixing religion and politics; it forces the hand of the Opposition, and makes the attitude of us Republicans misunderstood. In spite of all dissensions, France is one at heart; but the voice of the country is not for war. Of course, we may have to fight in our colonies.'

'Tripoli?' I asked.

'No,' he answered smiling. 'That's the leading question. We must fight as you fought the Red Indians. We have no fear of war at present – our ways are the ways of peace.'

'Naturally,' I answered, 'since the German Minister tells me that Germany will never fight France unless attacked, and he sees no signs of that.'

'The Belgians are growing restless because Hamburg is taking all the Brazilian coffee trade,' he said, absent-mindedly.

'Which means, interpreted,' I answered, 'that we might well look after our interests in Brazil.'

'Like all Frenchmen,' he said, 'I am ignorant of foreign geography, but our Ambassador in Washington is different; he knows the world, and the United States.'

I thanked him; I was always glad to hear Frenchmen speak well of Mr. Jusserand. He deserved all the praise they could give him.

'My friend,' said Paul Loubet, 'says the world and the United States, which means, I suppose, that Europe is one world and the United States another.' 'It almost seems so in Europe; but your acquisition of the Philippines will probably make you more and more a part of the European world.' 'I am afraid that George Washington and Lafayette would not have liked this,' said the ex-President.

One of the French delegates asked me whether it was true that the Germans would try to make terms with us for a cession of some foreign territory for one of the Philippine Islands. Waldhausen was at my elbow; I, smiling, put the question to him.

'It is Arcadian,' he said.

'Germany never gives up what she holds,' said the Frenchman, also smiling. 'Otherwise, you might induce her to surrender Heligoland to England, for a consideration, with the understanding that England should give it back to Denmark.'

Waldhausen laughed.

'Such generosity is too far in advance of our time. I am afraid Admiral von Tirpitz might object.'

Von Tirpitz, for those behind the scenes in German politics, was much in the public eye. It was well understood that as far as the naval programme was concerned, he was Germany. If the seizing of Slesvig and the completion of the Kiel canal made the German Fleet possible, with the acquiring of Heligoland, the efforts of Admiral von Tirpitz had made it a Navy. Through all the financial difficulties of the German Government, difficulties that alone prevented it from attacking France, von Tirpitz had held fast to the axiom that Germany's future was on the ocean. He was not the kind of marine minister who sticks fast to his desk and 'never goes to sea.' He had become the 'captain of the King's navee' by knowing his business, and, more than that, by studying the caprices of his Imperial Master's mind, as well as its fixed determination. Many times I had been told by candid friends in the diplomatic corps that the German Emperor had no respect for our navy, that he knew every ship by heart, that nevertheless, he examined as far as possible any new inventions adopted by our naval experts who were most kind in permitting German naval attachés and experts to examine them. In 1911 the coming of the Atlantic Squadron had excited interest in the naval position of our country. One scarcely ever saw an American flag on the ocean. Whatever Columbia did or wanted to do, she did not rule the seas; so our flag on the ships of the Atlantic Squadron was a delight to all Americans and somewhat of a surprise to foreigners.

At Kiel the general impression seemed to be that the Atlantic Squadron represented our whole navy! The Kaiser and von Tirpitz knew better, of course. Privately the Kaiser expressed his amusement at our attempt to build warships – he and von Tirpitz had secrets of their own. However, America was important enough to be given a sedative until his designs on France and Russia were completed. One might suspect this, then; but who could believe it!

My correspondents in Germany – people who know are wonderful helps to a man in the diplomatic service – concerned themselves largely with von Tirpitz and General von Freytag-Loringhoven. Von Tirpitz was the German Navy and the very intelligent writings of General the Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven made us almost think that he was the Army.

'Is he related to Freytag?' I had asked.

'What, the novelist?'

'The author of Debit and Credit?' I added.

'Certainly not; he is one of the greatest of the Baltic baronial families.'

If I had asked a Bourbon, in the reign of Louis XIV., whether he was related to Crébillon, he could not have been more shocked. Von Freytag-Loringhoven cut a great figure in Berlin. He had Russian affiliations, being of a Baltic family; his father had been well known in diplomacy. He knew Russia as well as he knew Germany; he was technical and experienced, and his writings were supposed to give indications of the ideas of the General Staff. The Russians in Copenhagen talked much of von Freytag-Loringhoven. I must repeat that, in interesting myself in German personalities, I was not considering them in relation to the future of my own country. There were some among my friends, like James Brown Scott – men of foresight – who seemed to have a wider vision. I was interested because I feared that the autonomy of a little nation was at stake, and because the absorption of that little nation would mean the assumption of the Danish Antilles.

That Germany had consulted Russia about a question to make war with England a pretext for seizing Denmark, we suspected. The end of the Japanese War had curbed Russia's eastern ambition for a time. How were we to be sure that the Baltic and the North Sea might not, under German tutelage, attract her?

If von Freytag-Loringhoven's utterances were to be taken seriously, it was evident that war was in the air; and why was von Tirpitz building up the German Navy? The distributors of rumours in Denmark said that all hopes of a Scandinavian confederacy were to be ended by a quarrel with England, a move on France, and the division of Scandinavia into two parts, one nominally Russian, the other, Denmark, to be actually German, while Norway should gradually be terrorised into submission. This shows how excited public opinion was. The German propaganda spread pleasant reports of the peaceful intentions of the Kaiser, the Crown Prince, and the personages in power in Germany. Above all, we were told how charming the Crown Princess Cecilia was, and how potent her influence would be in warding off any attempts of the Pan-Germans on Denmark, even if Germany and England should fly at each other's throats.

People in the court circle, who knew how little royal family alliances count to-day in actual politics, admitted that the Crown Princess was most charming and sympathetic; she is the sister of the Queen of Denmark, and she had become as German as it was possible for the daughter of a Russian mother to be. Her sister, Queen Alexandrina, had become thoroughly Danish, but then her tendencies had always been towards democracy and the simplicities of life.

The German news vendors alternately praised the Crown Prince and depreciated him. If he were violent, it was against the wishes of his father – he was a second Prince Hal trying on the imperial crown. As a rule, however, he was brought out of the background to show his virtues. On several occasions he had evinced more knowledge of what was going on than his father. This was notable in the Eulenberg scandal, when he fearlessly laid bare a horrible ulcer which was beginning to eat into the heart of the army. On this subject he and Max Harden, of the Zukunft, were in amazing alliance. Whatever may be said of the Crown Prince's political ambitions – and we believed and do believe that they meant world conquest – he is very much of a man. In 1911, it was understood that he would not condescend to wear the peace-mask that seemed to conceal his father's face. Dr. von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Chancellor, was temporising as usual. The Moroccan affair led to nothing because Germany's financial backers were not ready for war. The Chancellor was attacked by von Heydebrand; the Danish press gave graphic accounts of the scene when the Crown Prince, from the royal box, applauded every insult that the powerful Junker heaped on the Chancellor, who was merely the tool of the Kaiser. It was the time of the Emperor to temporise; the time had not come to strike; Germany was not rich enough. Russia was still doubtful. France, in the imperial opinion, was not sufficiently corrupted, and the dissensions between Ulster and the rest of Ireland had not yet reached that poisonous growth which, in that opinion, would force mutiny and sedition to poison the English. The Crown Prince probably, in his frankness, voiced more than his own inner sentiments. At any rate, to us near the frontier, it seemed so. However, the incident was used to the credit of the Crown Prince. Fair and open dealing for him! England might interfere in Morocco and other places to prevent his country from taking a place 'in the sun'; but let us have it out!

In the secret councils of the Social Democrats was the hope that, if a Hohenzollern must succeed the Kaiser, it would not be the Crown Prince. In spite of his amiabilities and his apparently youthful point of view of life – though there were fewer indiscretions to his credit than are generally attributed to Crown Princes – it was known that he was military to the core, and that in his time the soldier of the world would never lack employment. While the Kaiser was constantly insisting that more soldiers and more sailors and Krupp von Bohlen's newest instruments of destruction were pawns in the game of peace, his son made no pretence of agreeing with him. Clever or not, he had held that a straight line was the shortest way from one given point to another. And the Zabern incident and several others showed that the Crown Prince meant, when his chance came, to make war after the Napoleonic method and to exalt the sword above the pen and the ploughshare.