My long-standing preconceptions of Berlin as the phlegmatic capital of a phlegmatic people were obliterated for all time at eight-thirty o'clock on Saturday evening, July 25, 1914. Along with them went equally well-founded beliefs that, however incorrigible their War Party's lust for international strife, the German masses were pacific by temperament and conviction. When the news of Serbia's alleged rejection of Austria's ultimatum was hoisted in Unter den Linden, and Berlin gave way in a flash to a babel and pandemonium of sheer war fever probably never equaled in a civilized community, I knew that all my "psychology" of the Germans was as myopic as if I had learned it in Professor Münsterberg's laboratory at Harvard. Instantaneously I realized that the stage managers had done their work with deadly precision and all-devouring thoroughness. If the mere suggestion of gunpowder could distend the nostrils of the "peaceful Germans" and cause their capital to vibrate in every fiber of its being as that first real hint of war did, I was forced to conclude that the cataclysm now impending would find a Germany animated to its innermost depths by primeval fighting passions. Events have not belied the new and disquieting impressions with which Berlin's war delirium inspired me.
On the evening of July 25, after cabling to England and the United States accounts of the blackest Saturday in Berlin bourse history, I made my way to Unter den Linden in anticipation of demonstrations certain to be provoked by the result of the Austrian ultimatum, no matter whether Serbia had yielded or defied. I reached the Wilhelmstrasse corner, where the British Embassy stood, only a moment after the fateful bulletin had been put up in the Lokal-Anzeiger's windows. It read: "Serbia Rejects the Austrian Ultimatum!" That was not quite true--to put it mildly--as the world was soon to know that far from "rejecting" Count Berchtold's cavalier demands, Serbia bent the knee to every single one of them except that which called for abject surrender of her sovereign independence. But the huge crowds which had been gathered in Unter den Linden since sundown--it was now a little past eight-thirty o'clock and still quite light--knew nothing of this. All they knew and all they cared about was that "Serbien hat abgelehnt!" War, the intuition of the mob assured it, was now inevitable.
"Krieg! Krieg!" (War! War!) it thundered. "Nieder mit Serbien! Hoch, Oesterreich!" (Down with Serbia! Hurrah for Austria!) rang from thousands of frenzied throats. Processions formed. Men and youths, here and there women and girls, lined up, military fashion, four abreast. One cavalcade, the larger, headed toward Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate. Another eastward, down the Linden. A mighty song now rent the air--Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser (God Save Emperor Francis), the Austrian national anthem. Then shouts, yelled in the accents of imprecation--"Nieder mit Russland!" (Down with Russia). The bigger procession's destination was soon known. It was marching to the Austrian Embassy in the Moltke-strasse. The smaller parade was headed for the Russian Embassy in Unter den Linden. In my taxi I decided to follow on to Moltke-strasse, and, crossing to the far side of the Linden, I came up with the rearguard of the demonstrators just opposite the château-like Embassy of France in the Pariser Platz. Gathered on the portico servants were clustered watching the "manifestation." At their hapless heads the processionists were shaking their German fists as much as to say that France, too, was included in the orgy of patriotic wrath now surging up in the Teutonic soul. It was a touch of humor in an otherwise overwhelmingly grim spectacle.
Through the entrance to the leafy Tiergarten, down the pompous and sepulchral Avenue of Victory, across the Königs-Platz with its Gulliverian statue of the Iron Chancellor and the Column of Victory, through the district whose street nomenclature breathes of Germany's martial glory--Roon-strasse, Bismarck-strasse and Moltke-strasse--the parade, now swelled to many times its original proportions, halted in front of the Austrian Embassy. Some self-appointed cheer-leader called for Hochs for the ally, for another stanza of the Austrian national anthem, for more "Down with Serbia," and for more yells of defiance to Russia. Opposite the embassy-palace towered the massive block-square General Staff building. From it there emerged, while the demonstration was at its zenith, three young subalterns. The mob seized them joyously, shouldered them and acclaimed them--the brass-buttoned and epauletted embodiment of the army on whom Germany's hopes were presently to be pinned. "Krieg! Krieg!" the war mongers chanted in ecstatic shrieks. Then "Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles," twin of the Austrian anthem as far as the melody is concerned, was sung with tremendous fervor. The crowd yelled for Emperor Francis Joseph's ambassador, the Hungarian Count von Szögeny-Marich, but, if he was at home, he preferred not to face the multitude. Presently a beardless young embassy attaché appeared at an open window--the physical personification of the allied Empire--and he almost reeled from the shock of the tumultuous shout hurtled in his monocled countenance.
For nearly an hour delirium reigned unbridled. Then the demonstrators betook themselves back to the Linden district, where they met up with more processions. Throughout the night, far into Sunday morning, Berlin reverberated with their tramp and clamor. My doubts as to the capital's temper toward war were resolved, my cherished confidence in the average German's fundamental love of peace shattered. Berlin is the tuning-fork of the Empire. As she was shrieking "War! War!" so, I felt sure, Hamburg and Munich, Dresden and Stuttgart, Cologne and Breslau, Königsberg and Metz, would be shrieking before the world was many hours older. And when the Sunday papers reported that "fervent patriotic demonstrations" had broken out everywhere the night before, as soon as "Serbia's insolent action" was communicated to the public, something within me said that only a miracle could now restrain war-mad Germany from herself plunging into the fray.
I have said that Armageddon was instigated by the German War Party. In substantiation of that charge let me narrate a bit of unrecorded history. About four o'clock of the afternoon of July 25--the day of orgy in Berlin above described--the Austrian Foreign Office in Vienna issued a confidential intimation to various persons accustomed to be favored with such communications that the Serbian reply to the ultimatum had arrived and was satisfactory. It did not succumb in respect of every demand put forth by Austria, but it was sufficiently groveling to insure peace. Foreign newspaper correspondents, to several of whom the information was supplied, learned, when they applied at their own Embassies for confirmation, that the latter, too, had been formally acquainted with the fact that Serbia's concessions were far-reaching enough to guarantee a bloodless settlement of the ugly crisis.
Vienna breathed a long, sincere sigh of relief. She had feared the worst from the moment Count Berchtold dispatched the Berlin-dictated ultimatum to Belgrade; but the worst was over now. Serbian penitence had saved Austrian face.
While correspondents were busily preparing their telegrams, which were to flash all over the world the welcome tidings that war had been averted, though only by a hair's breadth, the Austrian Foreign Office was telephoning to the Foreign Office in Berlin the text of Serbia's reply.
A certain journalist was on his way to the telegraph office to "file" his "story." The editor of a great Vienna newspaper, a friend, intercepted him.
"Well, what are you saying?" the editor inquired. "That it's peace, after all," replied the correspondent.