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| |
| ENGLAND HAS DECLARED WAR ON GERMANY! |
| |
| OFFICIAL REPORT. |
| |
| This afternoon, shortly after the speech of |
| the Imperial Chancellor, in which the offense |
| against international law involved in our |
| setting foot on Belgian territory was frankly |
| acknowledged and the will of the German Empire |
| to make good the consequences was affirmed, |
| the British Ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen, |
| appeared in the Reichstag to convey to |
| Foreign Secretary von Jagow a communication |
| from his Government. In this communication |
| the German Government was asked to make an |
| immediate reply to the question whether it could |
| give the assurance that no violation of Belgian |
| neutrality would take place. The Foreign |
| Secretary forthwith replied that this was not |
| possible, and again explained the reasons which |
| compel Germany to secure herself against an |
| attack by the French army across Belgian soil. |
| Shortly after seven o'clock the British |
| Ambassador appeared at the Foreign Office to |
| declare war and demand his passports. |
| |
| We are informed that the German Government |
| has placed military necessities before all |
| other considerations, notwithstanding that it |
| had, in consequence thereof, to reckon that |
| either ground or pretext for intervention would |
| be given to the English Government. |
| |
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It was this news--reiterating by the printed word what the Chancellor had unblushingly announced in the Reichstag: that military necessities had taken precedence of "all other considerations," including honor--which aroused the ferocity of the mob and incited it, amid mad maledictions on "perfidious Albion," to vent its fury by attempting to wreck the English Embassy. This German "official report," moreover, besides distorting the facts so as to place the onus for the outbreak of hostilities exclusively upon England, deliberately misstated the object of Sir Edward Goschen's visit to the Foreign Office. As we know from his famous dispatch on the last phase, he did not "appear" there "to declare war." England's declaration of war, as a matter of historical record, was not made until eleven P.M., or midnight Berlin time. The assault on the Embassy by Kultur's knife-throwing, stone-hurling and window-breaking cohorts was in full progress by nine o'clock. It began almost immediately after Sir Edward Goschen's return from his celebrated farewell interview with the Imperial Chancellor--the torrid quarter of an hour in which von Bethmann Hollweg, incapable of concealing Germany's rage over the wrecking of her war scheme, blackened the Teutonic escutcheon for all time by branding the Belgian treaty of neutrality as a "scrap of paper." Of all egregious words which have fallen from the lips of German "diplomats," von Bethmann Hollweg's immortal indiscretions of that day will live longest, to his own and his country's ineffaceable shame.
While at work on my dispatches in my hotel room--it was now about nine o'clock--I could hear Unter den Linden below my windows roaring with mob fury against Britain. "Krämer-volk!" (Peddler nation!) "Rassen-Verrat!" (Race treachery!) "Nieder mit England!" (Down with England!) "Tod den Engländer!" (Death to the English!) were the shouts which burst forth in mad chorus. I have never hunted beasts in the jungle. Never have my ears been smitten with the snarl and growl of wild animals at bay. I never heard the horizon ring with the tumult of howling dervishes plunging fanatically to the attack. But the populace of Berlin seemed to me at that moment to be giving a vivid composite imitation of them all. Certainly no civilized community on earth ever surrendered so completely to all-obsessing brute fury as the war mob which thirsted for British blood in "Athens-on-the-Spree" on the night of August 4, 1914. It gave vent to all the animal passions and breathed the murder instinct said to be inherent in the average human when unreasoning rage temporarily supplants sanity. If it had caught sight of or could have laid hands on Sir Edward Goschen, or any one else identifiable as an Engländer, it would undoubtedly have torn him limb from limb. The Germans may not be the modern personification of the Huns, but the savagery to which their Imperial capital ruthlessly resigned itself on the threshold of war with England justifies the belief that they have inherited some of the characteristics of Attila's fiends. Next morning's Berlin papers explained in all seriousness, on police authority, that the mob "infuriated" because persons in the English Embassy had thrown "beggars' pennies" from the windows--a ludicrous falsehood.
Half an hour later I came down-stairs to motor to the Main Telegraph Office with my American cables. No sooner had I stepped to the threshold of the hotel than three policemen grabbed me--one pinioning my right arm, another my left, and the third gripping me by the back of the neck. All around the hotel entrance stood gesticulating Germans yelling, like Comanche Indians, "Englischer Spion! Nach Spandau mit ihm!" (English spy! To Spandau with him!) In far less time than it takes me to tell it, my captors, who had now drawn their sabers to "protect" me, as they explained, from the murderous intentions of the mob, tossed me into the rear seat of an open taxicab waiting at the curb. They allowed sufficient time to elapse for the mob, which now encircled the cab shouting "Englischer Hund!" (English dog!) "Schiesst den Spion!" (Shoot the spy!) and other cheery greetings, to cool its passions on my hapless head and body with fisticuffs and canes, while a misdirected upper-cut from a youth, aimed squarely at my jaw, did nothing but knock my hat into the bottom of the car and send my eye-glasses splintered and spinning to the same destination. The police, still covering me with their sabers, shoved me to the floor of the car and gave orders to the driver to make post-haste for the Mittel-strasse police station, half a dozen blocks away. The power of speech having temporarily returned--I wonder if my readers will regard it a humiliating confession if I acknowledge that cold chills were now chasing up and down my spine?--I ventured to ask the policemen to whom or to what I was indebted for this "striking" token of their solicitude.
"You know perfectly well why you're here," replied the giant who was gripping me by the right arm as if I might be contemplating escape from the lower regions of the taxi by falling through or flying away. "The mob heard the Adlon was full of English spies, and they were waiting for you to come out. They'd have killed you on the spot if we hadn't been there to rescue you." That was, of course, simply an absurd lie, as fast-crowding events of the succeeding night were to demonstrate. I was arrested because I had been denounced, in all formality, as a spy. If the German authorities are inclined to assert the contrary, I refer them, without permission, to the document reproduced opposite this page--the official and original denunciation obligingly slipped by mistake into my handbag of personal belongings at the Police-Presidency later in the night, when, on the demand of the American Ambassador, I was precipitately released from custody. Doctor Otto Sprenger, of Bremen, was one of the police spies stationed either in the Hotel Adlon, or at a wire therewith connected, to overhear conversations, and who, in the hour of his country's extremities, struck a herculean blow for Kaiser and Empire by catching Mackenzie (Kingsley is as near as he could get the name) and myself in our telephonic plot to frustrate Germany's war plans.
I was still remonstrating with the police about the absurdity of my arrest when the taxi pulled up in front of Mittel-strasse station. Evidently news of our impending arrival had preceded us, for another gang of shouting patriots was assembled in front of the station and proceeded to bestow upon me the same sort of a welcome as I received at the hands of the mob in Unter den Linden. Still "protecting" me with their drawn sabers, my guardians contrived to push and drag me into the station-house and up one flight of stairs to headquarters before the crowd had done anything more serious than crack me over the head and shoulders half a dozen times. I was then led into the back room of the station, where, as I soon saw, pickpockets and other criminals are taken to be stripped and searched, and was ordered to sit down in the midst of a group of twenty policemen, who eyed me with glances mingling contempt and murderous intent.
Facsimile of Original Denunciation of the Author as an "English Spy"
I had partially recovered my equilibrium after my somewhat exciting experiences of the previous ten minutes and found myself able to talk dispassionately to a courteous young lieutenant of police who was in charge of the station. I told him I was not only an American, but a long-time resident of Berlin, with a home of my own in Wilmersdorf, and that if he would communicate with his superior, Doctor Henninger, chief of the political police, who had known me for years, he would soon be able to convince himself that a grotesque mistake had been made in arresting me as an "English spy." The lieutenant, who, I should think, was the only man in all Berlin who had not yet entirely lost his reason, asked me politely for my papers and other credentials. I handed him my American passport, newly-issued at the Embassy a few days before, a visiting-card bearing my Berlin home address, one or two copies of my most recent news telegrams to London and New York, which I happened to have with me, my correspondent's identification card stamped by the Berlin police department, and finally a letter which I had been carrying with me during the war crisis for precisely some such emergency--a communication sent me from the Imperial yacht in the summer of 1913, acknowledging in gracious terms a copy of Men Around the Kaiser, which William II had deigned to accept at my hands. The police lieutenant almost clicked heels and came to the salute when he saw that his prisoner was the possessor of so priceless a document. He asked me to "calm" myself and await developments. "Es wird schon gut sein." Which in real language means that "everything will be all right."
As their superior officer had not lopped off my head on sight, and even condescended to hold courteous converse with the "spy," the group of policemen in whose midst I found myself now warmed up to me perceptibly.