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

Baron de Buxhoevenden, the most calm, the most self-controlled of all my colleagues, was unusually silent; his wife, than whom Russia had no more intelligent and patriotic woman in her borders, had said that the war would either break or make Russia. 'The Russian people,' she said, 'since the beginning of the war, are better fed than they ever were. The suppression of vodka has enabled them to pay their taxes and to begin to get rid of the parasites who prey on thoughtless drunkards. Their prosperity will either induce them to rebel against their rulers, or to accept the government because of their improved conditions.'

'But why are they better fed?' I had asked.

'We are exporting nothing. The Russian peasant eats the food he raises. Butter is no longer a luxury. I have hopes for Russia – and fears.'

Her fears were justified. The murder of Rasputin called attention to the dissensions in the Russian court. Admiring the Empress Dowager, as everybody in the court circle did, it seemed amazing that her son, of whom we knew little, should have permitted this peasant to acquire such influence over his wife. There were fashionable ladies who knelt to this strange apostle of the occult, who kissed his hands with fervour. But murder was murder, and coming not so long after the killing of the Crown Prince of Turkey, it gave the impression that the oriental point of view as to the value of human life existed in both countries. As time went on, Russia occupied our vision more and more.

In spite of the revelations that have been made, revelations which show that the only secrets are those buried with men who have found it to their honour or interest to keep them – the details of the reasons which caused Russia to mobilise in July are not fully known. How the Russians gained their information of the intentions of Germany in their regard is very well known. The most clever of Russian spies was always in the confidence of the Kaiser; he paid for his knowledge with his life.

As days passed, it became evident that the Royal Couple in Russia were being gradually isolated. Calumnies almost as evil and quite as baseless against the Tsarina as those published about Marie Antoinette were freely circulated. To review here this campaign of malice is not necessary. There were no chivalrous swords ready to leap from the scabbards for her. The age of chivalry seemed indeed dead. The poor lady was not even picturesque, whereas her brilliant mother-in-law, Dagmar of Denmark, was still beautiful and picturesque; she was imperial, but then she understood what democracy meant. It is said that she believed that, if her son had appeared in his uniform on horseback, surrounded by a staff of men who represented traditions, the revolution would not have begun. Neither the Tsar not the Tsarina understood what tradition meant to the Russian mind. The empress was a German at heart, – an overfond and superstitious mother. Good women have never made successful rulers, as a rather cynical Russian said to me, à propos of the Empress Catherine. The nobility disliked her because she kept aloof from them. The glitter and the pomp of court life which the Russian aristocracy loved, the consideration which monarchs are expected to show for the social predilections of their subjects were disregarded by her. Living in perpetual fear, her nerves were shattered. All her interests centred in her family and in the unbending conviction of a German princess that the divine right of kings is a dogma. She was as incapable of understanding that there were powers in the nation which could destroy as was Marie Antoinette before she met destruction. We understood at Copenhagen that she looked on all the acts of the emperor that were not autocratic as weak; members of the Duma must be subservient and grateful; otherwise, it was the duty of the Tsar to treat them with the severity they deserved. The concessions, which, if granted earlier would have saved the emperor, were very moderate – merely a responsible ministry and a constitution. The Tsar, under the influence of the empress, the reactionary Protopopoff and the little clique of exclusives, who had forgotten everything valuable and learned nothing new, refused to grasp these ropes of salvation. The strength of the Grand Duke Nicholas-Michailovitch amazed and disconcerted this clique. 'If,' said one of the elderly Russian gentlemen we knew, 'he is not exiled, he will try to be President of all the Russias one day!' The emperess dowager was distrusted by the party around the empress. The empress dowager believed in prosecuting the war, for she knew that Russia could only follow her destiny happily freed from German control.

From February until March, 1917, Russia continued to be the one subject of discussion in diplomatic circles. It was the general opinion that the empress was the great obstacle to the emperor's giving a liberal constitution to his people. The Danish court, though the Emperor William had accused it of indiscretion, was silent. Prince Valdemar, who was, like all the sons and daughters of King Christian IX., devoted to the dowager empress, was plainly uneasy. We all knew that his sympathies were with the Liberal Party and against the pro-German and absolutist clique. 'The Russian people have endured much,' he said on March 10th, the day on which the news of the Tsar's abdication arrived; and, afterwards, – 'Thank God – so far it has been almost a bloodless Revolution.'

'Why,' asked the devout Danish Conservative, who believed that kings were still all-powerful, 'why does not King George of England help his cousin?'

It was only too plain that in spite of all warnings, 'his cousin' had put himself beyond all human help.

The Russian soldiers calmly doffed their caps and said 'I will go home for my part of the land!' The condition of Petrograd was such that chaos had come again. To save the lives of the Tsar and Tsarina, Kerensky insisted that capital punishment should be abolished. Count Christian Holstein-Ledreborg, fresh from Russia, reported that at the soldiers' meeting in the banquet room of the Winter Palace, speakers imposed silence by shooting at the ceiling! There was an attempt on the part of the new democrats to have prostitution, hitherto the luxury of the rich, put within the reach of all.

Russia had gone out of the war; it was surely time for us to go in. On April 7, 1917, I informed the Foreign Office that the President at Congress had declared us in a state of war with Germany. Further patience would have been a crime.

From that day the Legation took on a new aspect. Our decks were cleared for observation and action. Mr. Cleveland Perkins, who had courageously assumed the duties of the Secretary of Legation although relieved by a secretary, had new and difficult duties thrust upon him, to which he was fully equal. Mr. Seymour Beach Conger and Mr. John Covington Knapp were invaluable. No words of mine can express my sense of their self-sacrificing patriotism. Mr. Groeninger did three men's work and Captain Totten kept us all up to the mark by his fiery and persistent enthusiasm. No great dinners now! Even if we had been in the mood, fire and food had become too scarce. Mr. Conger did a most important service; he looked after the crowds of late comers from Germany, and discovered what light they could throw on German conditions. The State Department came to the rescue of our staff, which was few but fit; Mr. Grant-Smith was sent from Washington, with instructions to spend all the money that was necessary. He made a complete organisation, and I, struck heavily in health, laid down my task regretfully, leaving it in hands more competent under the changed circumstances.

There is no use in hiding the fact that, even before Russia broke, we who feared the triumph of Germany had many dark days; but there was never a time when my colleagues of the Allies despaired. How Mr. Allart, our Belgian colleague, lived through it, I do not know! The Danes stood by him manfully, and he never lacked the sympathy of his colleagues; but he suffered.

'The moment that England is seriously inconvenienced,' a German Professor of Psychology had said, 'she will give in.' We know how false this was. The race, pronounced degenerate, whose fibre was supposed to be eaten up with an inordinate love of sport, showed bravery to the backbone when it awakened to the real issues of the war. The upper classes of the English were splendid beyond words. Their sacrifices were terrible in the beginning, but their example told; and long before the crash of Russia came, there was no question of 'business as usual.' The British nation had realised that it was fighting, not only for its life, but for the principle on which its life is based. Yet the victory was by no means sure. 'The Empire may go down under the assaults of the Huns – let it go rather than that we should make a single compromise,' said Sir Ralph Paget. Mr. Gurney, Colonel Wade, and all the staunch men connected with his Legation, echoed his words.

Mr. Wells, the novelist preacher, may say what he will of the failure of English education, but it has produced men of a quality which all the men can understand and admire.18 As to the French, they, too, had their sober hours, and the saddest was caused, perhaps, by the dread that we had forgotten what the war was for; such soldiers as they were! – Captain de Courcel and Baron Taylor, suffering from wounds, and yet counting every hour with pain that kept them from their duty. But we came in none too soon; from my point of view, it is unreasonable to believe that the apparent disintegration of Germany and Austria was the cause of our victory. The cause of it was the increase of man power on the Western Front. In Copenhagen, our best military experts said, 'If the United States can be ready in time to supply the losses of the French and English; if your aviators can get to work, victory is assured.' These experts feared that we would be too slow, and there were dark, very dark, days in 1916 and 1917.

President Wilson's ideals were, in the beginning, looked on as doctrinaire – breezes from the groves of the Academies. Some of the elders and scribes of Europe, adept in the methods that nullified the good intentions of the Hague conferences, looked on his explanation of the aims of the conflict as the courtiers of Louis XIV. might have contemplated the pages of Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity, if Chateaubriand had lived at Port Royal in the time of those cynics; but the people in all the Scandinavian countries took to them as the expression of their aspirations. The chancelleries of Europe heard a new voice with a new note, but the people did not find it new. President Wilson found himself, when he gave the reasons of our country for entering the war, interpreting the meaning of the people. Until he spoke the war seemed to mean the saving of the territory of one nation, or the regaining it for another, or the existence of a nation's life. Standing out of the European miasma, with nothing to gain except the fulfilment of our ideals, and all to lose if there were to be losses of life and material, we gave a meaning to the war, – a new meaning which had been obscured.

Nevertheless, let us not forget that Germany has not changed her ideals; all the forces of the civilised world have not succeeded in changing them. Of democracy, in the American sense of the word, she has no more understanding than Russia – nor at present does she really want to have.

To a certain extent she conquered us. She obliged us to adopt her methods of warfare; to imitate her system of espionage; to co-ordinate, for the moment at least, all the functions of national life under a system as centralised as her own. If she gave temperance to Russia, an army to England, religion to France, she almost succeeded in depriving our Western hemisphere of its faith in God.

Her efficiency was so expensive that it was making her bankrupt; she was paying too much for her perfection of method. To justify it in the eyes of her own people she went to war. France was to pay her debts and Russia to be the way of an inexpensive road to the East. Her methods in peace cost her too much; a short war would save her credit. To our regret, perhaps remorse, we have been forced by her to fight her Devil with his own fire; and now we hope for a process of reconstruction in this great and populous country based on our own ideals; but we cannot change the aspirations or the hearts of the Germans. We can only take care that they keep the laws made by nations who have well-directed consciences, – this lesson I have learned near to their border.

THE END

1

H. Rosendal, The Problem of Danish Slesvig.

2

Madame Hegermann-Lindencrone is the author of In the Court of Memory and The Sunny Side of Diplomacy.

3

On the outbreak of the war, the Grand Duchess threw off her allegiance to Germany, and resumed her Russian citizenship.

4

Baron Speck von Sternberg died on May 23rd, 1908.

5

'We can say without hesitation that during the last century the United States have nowhere found better understanding or juster recognition than in this country. More than any one else the Emperor William II. manifested this understanding and appreciation of the United States of America.' – Von Bülow's Imperial Germany, p. 51.

6

Malmö is a town on the Swedish side of the Sound, an hour and a half by steamboat from Copenhagen. Lord Bothwell was imprisoned there.

7

Scribner's Magazine.

8

I regret that I cannot give the story in the rhyme, which was Bavarian French.

9

The Army Bill of 1913 'met with such a willing reception from all parties as has never before been accorded to any requisition for armaments on land or at sea.' – Von Bülow's Imperial Germany, p. 201.

10

The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, by Sir William M. Ramsay. Hodder and Stoughton.

11

Dr. J. P. Bang's translation. Doctor Bang deserves well of all lovers of freedom for his translation into Danish of typical sermons from German pastors possessed of the spirit of hatred. Dr. Bang is a professor of theology in the University of Copenhagen. It ought to be remembered that the University of Copenhagen, in a neutral country geographically part of Germany, made no protest against the audacious volume.

12

Devoted to France, the friend of M. Jusserand; a great romance philologer.

13

'My old commander, the late General Field-Marshal Freiheer von Loë, a good Prussian and a good Catholic, once said to me that, in this respect, matters would not improve until the well-known principle of French law "que la recherche de la paternité était interdite" is changed to "la recherche du confessional était interdite."' – Von Bülow: Imperial Germany, p. 185.

14

In Rome, 'the proletariat' meant the people who had children.

15

Mr. Thomas P. Gill is the permanent Secretary of the Irish Agricultural and Technical Board.

16

Dr. Francis Hagerup, Norwegian Minister to Copenhagen, now at Stockholm. Count Szchenyi, Austro-Hungarian Minister, Señor de Riaño, now Spanish Minister at Washington.

17

In The War and the Bagdad Railway. J. B. Lippincott & Co.

18

Of all the many young men I knew in England and Ireland, most of them the sons or grandsons of old friends, there are only three alive; two of them, the sons of Mr. Thomas P. Gill, of the Irish Technical and Agricultural Board, have been made invalids in the war.