No story of our Berlin war Embassy would be complete without a reference to the Ambassador's lieutenants, who, inspired by his own example of unruffled good nature and limitless patience, capably played their own trying parts. At Judge Gerard's right hand was Joseph Clark Grew, First Secretary, Harvard '02, who, having shot wild beasts in the jungles of Asia, would naturally not quail before Germans, no matter how stormy the conditions. Grew is one of the exceptional young men in our diplomatic service, because, he has weathered its snares unspoiled. A distinguished secretarial career at such important posts as Cairo, Mexico City, Vienna, Petrograd and Berlin, in the course of which he frequently acted as Ambassador or Minister in charge, has left him, at thirty-five, as natural, human and American as no doubt many Harvard men are while still beneath the democratizing influence of the campus elms. I mention the preservation of these qualities in Grew because they have been known to disappear in many of our worthy young fellow countrymen, jumped precipitately from college into representative positions abroad, and who thenceforth refused to brush shoulders with anything beneath the rank of royalty.
In Roland B. Harvey and Albert Billings Ruddock, respectively Second and Third Secretaries, Judge Gerard was also the fortunate possessor of a couple of adjutants who, in the presence of emergency, showed that hustle and bonhomie, besides being American talents, are diplomatic traits of no mean order. To preserve calm during the passport stampede of the first week of August, 1914, was to exhibit the finesse of a Disraeli. Harvey and Ruddock are types of the younger generation of American diplomatists who go in for the career with a view to devoting themselves to its serious side and from among whom, some day, we ought to evolve a professional service worthy of the name. Neither of them ever struck me as being afflicted by such emotions as filled the breast of a certain well-known young man when promoted from a European first-secretaryship to one of our important ministerships in South America. "Well, old boy," I asked him, "what do you think about going to ----?" "Oh," he rejoined, "I suppose it's all right, but it's a h-- of a way from Paris!"
I must not end this chapter, which I hope is recognizable as a poor expression of gratitude to all concerned for many kindnesses rendered, without a mention of the youngest, but by no means the least meritorious member, of the Berlin war Embassy family--Lanier Winslow, the Ambassador's ever-ebullient private secretary. War sobered Winslow so rapidly that he committed matrimony before it was six months old. I can hear him now, in the midst of the passport panic, still imitating Frank Tinney or humming Get Out and Get Under, just as Nero might have done if Rome had known what rag-time was. At an hour when it was most needed, Lanier Winslow was a paragon of good humor, and altogether, by common consent, a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
CHAPTER IX
AUGUST FOURTH
Germany's war Juggernaut by the morning of Monday, August 3, was in full, but incredibly noiseless, motion. I always knew it was a magnificently well greased machine, geared for the maximum of silence, but I felt sure it could not swing into action without some reverberating creaks. Yet Berlin externally had been far more feverishly agitated on Spring Parade days at recurring ends of May than it was now, with "enemies all around" and that "war on two fronts," which most Germans used to talk about as something, Gott sei Dank, they would never live to see. One's male friends of military age--it was now the second day of mobilization--kept on melting away from hour to hour, but amid a complete lack of fuss and bustle. It almost seemed as if the army had orders to rush to the fighting-line in gum-shoes and that everything on wheels had rubber tires. As the Fatherland for years had armed in silence, so she was going to battle. We saw no seventeen-inch guns rumbling to the front. Those were Germany's best-concealed weapons. A military attaché of one of the chief belligerents, who lived in Berlin for four years preceding the war, has since confessed that he never even knew of the "Big Berthas'" existence!
Germany girding for Armageddon was distinctly a disappointment. I entirely agreed with a portly dowager from the Middle West, who, between frettings about when she could get a train to the Dutch frontier, continually expressed her chagrin at such "a poor show." She imagined, like a good many of the rest of us, that mobilization in Germany would at the very least see the Supreme War Lord bolting madly up and down Unter den Linden, plunging silver spurs into a foaming white charger and brandishing a glistening sword in martial gestures as Caruso does when he plays Radames in the finale of the second act of Aida. Verdi's Egyptian epic is the Kaiser's favorite opera, and he ought to have remembered, we thought, how a conquering hero should demean himself at such a blood-stirring hour. At least Berlin, we hoped, would rise to the occasion, and thunder and rock with the pomp and circumstance of war's alarums.
There was amazingly little of anything of that sort. The Kaiser instead automobiled around town in a prosaic six-cylinder Mercedes, as he long was wont to do, just keeping some rather important professional engagements with the Chief of the General Staff, the Imperial Chancellor and the Secretary of the Navy. As he flitted by, the huge crowds lined up on the curbstone stiffened into attitudes, clicked heels, doffed hats and "hoched." The atmosphere was stimmungsvoller than usual, for German phlegm had vanished along with high prices on the Bourse, but the paroxysm of electric excitement which I always fancied would usher in a German war was unaccountably missing. When you mentioned that phenomenon to German friends, their bosoms swelled with visible pride. They were immeasurably flattered by your indirect compliment that the Kaiser's war establishment was so perfect a mechanism that it could clear for action almost imperceptibly.
I had now deserted my home in suburban Wilmersdorf, which I nicknamed the "District of Columbia," for in and all around it Berlin's American colony was domiciled, and taken a room for the opening scenes of the war drama in the Hotel Adlon. With its broad fronts on the Linden and Pariser Platz, and the French, British and Russian Embassies within a stone's throw to the right and left, the Adlon was an ideal vantage point. If there were to be "demonstrations," I could feel sure, at so strategic a point, of being in the thick of them. Events of the succeeding thirty-six hours were to show that I did not reckon without my host on that score.
From window and balcony overlooking the Linden I could now see or hear at intervals detachments of Berlin regiments, Uhlans or Infantry of the Guard, or a battery of light artillery, swinging along to railway stations to entrain for the front. Occasionally battalions of provincial regiments, distinguishable because the men did not tower into space like Berlin's guardsmen, crossed town en route from one train to another. The men seemed happier than I had ever before seen German soldiers. That was the only difference, or at least the principal one. The prospect of soon becoming cannon-fodder was evidently far from depressing. Most of them carried flowers entwined round the rifle barrel or protruding from its mouth. Here and there a bouquet dangled rakishly from a helmet. Now and then a flaxen-haired Prussian girl would step into the street and press a posey into some trooper's grimy hand. Yet, except for the fact that the soldiers were all in field gray, (I wonder when the Kaiser's military tailors began making those millions of gray uniforms!) with even their familiar spiked headpiece masked in canvas of the same hue, the Kaiser's fighting men marching off to battle might have been carrying out a workaday route-march. Then, suddenly, a company or a whole battalion would break into song, and the crowd, trailing alongside the bass-drum of the band, just as in peace times, would take up the refrain, and presently half-a-mile of Unter den Linden was echoing with Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, and I knew that the Fatherland was at war.