At the railway stations of Berlin and countless other German towns and cities at that hour heart-rending little tragedies were being enacted, as fathers, mothers, wives, sisters and sweethearts bade a long farewell to the beloved in gray. Only rarely did some man in uniform himself surrender to the emotions of the moment. These swarthy young Germans, with fifty or sixty pounds of impedimenta strapped round them, were endowed with Spartan stolidity now, and smilingly buoyed up the drooping spirits of the kith and kin they were leaving behind. "Es wird schon gut, Mütterchen! Es wird schon gut!" (It will be all right, mother dear! It will be all right!) Thus they returned comfort for tears. "Nicht unterliegen! Besser nicht zurückkehren!" (Don't be beaten! Better not come back at all!) was the good-by greeting blown with the final kisses as many a trainload of embryonic heroes faded slowly from sight beneath the station's gaping archway. Germany was now indubitably convinced that its war was war in a holy cause. The time had come for the Fatherland to rise to the majesty of a great hour. "Auf wiedersehen!" sang the country to the army. But if there was to be no reunion, the army must go down fighting to the last gasp for unsere gerechte Sache, manfully, tirelessly, ruthlessly, till victory was enforced. Such were the inspiring thoughts amid which the boys in field gray trooped off to die for Kaiser and Empire.
The outstanding event of August 3 was the publication of the German Government's famous apologia for the war, the so-called "White Paper" officially described as "Memorandum and Documents in Relation to the Outbreak of the War." Early in the afternoon a telephone message arrived for me at the Adlon to the effect that if I would call at the Press Bureau of the Foreign Office at five o'clock, Legationsrat Heilbron, one of Hammann's lieutenants whom I had known for many years, would be glad to deliver me an advance copy for special transmission to London and New York. I lay great stress on the fact that up to sun-down of August 3, 1914, I continued to be persona gratissima with the Imperial German Government. It was true that one of the young Foreign Office cubs told off to censor press cablegrams at the Main Telegraph Office had, during the preceding three days, expressed annoyance with what he considered my eagerness to "go into details," but Legationsrat Heilbron's invitation to fetch the "White Paper" was gratifying evidence that my relations with the powers-that-be were still "correct," even if not cordial. I was glad of that, because there was constantly in my mind the desire to remain in Germany, whatever happened, with a front-row seat for the big show. At the appointed hour I presented myself in Herr Heilbron's room on the ground floor of the Wilhelmstrasse front of the Foreign Office. He greeted me with old-time courtesy, though I found his demeanor perceptibly depressed. He handed me a copy of the Denkschrift, and, when I begged him for a second one, he complied with a gracious bitte sehr.
A London colleague had already intimated to me that the Imperial Chancellor, desiring to place the German case promptly and fully before the British and American publics, would "do his best" with the military authorities who were now in supreme control of the postal telegraph and cable lines to induce them to allow London and New York correspondents to file exhaustive "stories" on the White Paper. As I was sure, however, that Reuter's Agency for England and the Associated Press for America would be handling the affair at great length, my treatment of it was confined, as was usual under such circumstances, to telegraphing a brief introductory summary.
What struck me instantly as the hall-marks of the German publication were its treatment of the war as an exclusively Russian-provoked Russo-German affair and its brazenly ex-parté character--how ex-parté I did not fully realize till I read England's White Paper a week later. Sir Edward Grey laid his cards on the table, without marginal notes or comment of any kind, and asked the world to pass judgment. Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg's White Paper began with a lengthy plea of justification and ended with quotation of such communications between the Kaiser's Government and its ambassadors and between the German Emperor and the Czar as would most plausibly support the Fatherland's case for war. It was manifestly a biased and incomplete record. It was in fact a doctored record, and suggested that its authors had Bismarck's mutilation of the Ems telegram in mind as a precedent, in emulation of which no German Government could possibly go wrong.
Although compiled to include events up to August 1, the German White Paper was silent as the grave in regard to Belgium and the negotiations with the Government of Great Britain. Issued on the night of August 3, when hundreds of thousands of German troops were waiting at Aix-la-Chapelle for the great assault on Liége--if, indeed, at that hour they were not already across the Belgian frontier--this sacred brief designed to establish the Fatherland's case at the bar of world opinion had no single word to say on what was destined to be almost the supreme issue of the war. It was the last word in Imperial German deception. If the German public had known that Sir Edward Grey on July 30 had already "warned Prince Lichnowsky that Germany must not count upon our standing aside in all circumstances," I imagine its bitterness a few nights later, when the fable of England's "treacherous intervention" was sprung upon the deluded Fatherland, might have been less barbaric in its intensity.
Next to the omission of all reference to what Sir Edward Grey called Germany's "infamous proposal" for the purchase of British neutrality--a pledge not to despoil France of European territory if England would stand with folded arms while Germany violated Belgium and ravished the French Colonial Empire--the striking feature of the Berlin White Paper was the admission of German-Austrian complicity in the humiliation of Serbia. The Foreign Office, as I have previously explained, had zealously affirmed Germany's entire detachment from Austria's programme for avenging Serajevo. What did the White Paper now tell us? That
"Austria had to admit that it would not be consistent either with the dignity or the self-preservation of the Monarchy to look on longer at the operations on the other side of the border without taking action.... We were able to assure our ally most heartily of our agreement with her view of the situation, and to assure her that any action she might consider it necessary to take in order to put an end to the movement in Servia directed against the existence of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy would receive our approval. We were fully aware, in this connection, that warlike moves on the part of Austria-Hungary against Servia would bring Russia into the question, and might draw us into a war in accordance with our duties as an ally."
The historic and ineffaceable fact is that Austria--wabbly, invertebrate Austria, which would even to-day, but for Germany, lay prostrate and vanquished--never made a solitary move in the whole plot to coerce Serbia without the full concurrence of the big brother at Berlin. It would be an insult to the intelligence of German diplomacy, stupid as it is, to imagine that the Kaiser's Government sat mute, unconsulted and nonchalant, while Austria worked out a scheme certain, as the Germans themselves admit in their White Paper, to plunge Europe into war.
It was my privilege on arriving in the United States on August 22, to furnish the New York Times with the first copy of the German White Paper to reach the American public. In preparing a prefatory note to accompany the verbatim translation published in next day's paper, I selected the paragraph above quoted as primâ-facie evidence that the German claim of non-collusion with Austria is subterfuge--to give it the longer and less unparliamentary term.
The German White Paper was prepared formally for the information of the Reichstag, which was summoned to meet on Tuesday, August 4 of imperishable memory, for the purpose of voting $325,000,000 of initial war credits. Paris was not won in the expected six weeks, and the Reichstag has voted $7,500,000,000 of war credits up to this writing (September 1, 1915), with melancholy promise of still more to come. The twenty-four hours preceding the war sitting had not been eventless. Monsieur Sverbieff and the staff of the Russian Embassy were the victims of gross insults from the mob in Unter den Linden, as they left their headquarters in automobiles for the railway station. Mounted police were present to "keep order," but their "vigilance" did not deter German men and youths from spitting in the faces of the Czar's representatives, belaboring them with walking-sticks and umbrellas, and offering rowdy indignities to the women of the ambassadorial party. In front of the French Embassy menacing crowds stood throughout the day and night, waiting for a chance to exhibit German patriotism at Monsieur Cambon's expense. When Señor Polê de Bernábe, the Spanish Ambassador, who was calling to arrange to take over the representation of France during the war, made his appearance, the mob mistook him for Cambon and was just prevented in the nick of time from assaulting the Spaniard. How the French Embassy finally got away from Germany, under circumstances which would have shamed a Fiji Island government, was later related for the benefit of posterity in the French Yellow Book. When I read it months later, I remembered my first German teacher in Berlin, a noblewoman, once telling me, when I asked her how to say "gentleman" in German: "There is no such thing as a 'gentleman' in the German language." That was paraphrased to me by another German on a later occasion, when, discussing the ability of German science, so well demonstrated during this war, to devise a substitute for almost anything, he remarked: "The only thing we can't make is a gentleman, because we never had a proper analysis of the necessary ingredients." The Germans, in their communicative moments, always used to acknowledge that Bismarck was right when he called them "a nation of house-servants." It is impressively exemplified on their stage, which boasts the finest character actors imaginable; but when a German player essays to portray the gentleman, he is grotesque. He gropes helplessly in a strange and unexplored realm.