We had just been bowed out of the place of our brief detention when the familiar outlines of "Joe" Grew loomed into view, down the corridor, and with him "Fritz," the German "life-guard" of the Embassy. It is not customary for American men to kiss each other, but I confess here to having been momentarily inspired with a strong temptation to lavish some form of osculatory gratitude upon Grew. Certainly I felt that there was nothing quite so good on God's footstool just then as to be an American citizen. When Grew insisted on packing all five of us--Tower, Mrs. Hensel, Bouton, Schrape and myself--into the car and driving us back to the Embassy (it was now the romantic hour of one A.M.) behind the protecting folds of the Stars and Stripes flapping defiantly at the windshield, I vowed a solemn, silent oath--to aspire in such days as might still be left to me for an opportunity some day to reciprocate in kind the service the Ambassador and Grew had that night rendered me, the supreme service men can render a fellow man--to save his life.
They were to be called upon, though I did not then know it, to rescue me once again before either they or I were twenty-four hours older.
CHAPTER XI
THE LAST FAREWELL
Such sleep as I enjoyed in what remained of the night between August 4 and 5 was secured, for the first time in a week, beneath my own roof. I had finished with the "hospitality" of the Hotel Adlon for all time to come. After a brief visit at the Embassy, to assure the Ambassador of my everlasting gratitude for having thrown out the life-line, and seeing Mrs. Hensel safely started for her home in Charlottenburg under trusted escort, I betook myself to Wilmersdorf, where our faithful little German governess, Anna Kranz, had been holding the fort all summer during the absence of my family in the United States. I telephoned Fräulein from the Embassy a summary of the night's events, fearing that police minions might be paying me a domiciliary visit and cause the poor girl unnecessary alarm. I told her Schrape was coming home with me for the night and that as neither of us had had a bite since the preceding noon, we could do full justice to anything, however frugal, which might at that romantic hour still be discoverable in the larder. It was a wide-eyed, then tearful and always sympathetic Thuringian damsel, who listened to our story over bread and cheese at the romantic hour of two-thirty A.M. I can hear her now interrupting with a characteristic and condoling "Aber, Herr Wile!"
Having dispatched Schrape to the Adlon early next day to pay my bill and fetch the belongings I had had so abruptly to leave behind me there the night before, I proceeded to town. At the Embassy was a host of friends anxious for news of me. The most absurd rumors, it seemed, were in circulation. There was a detailed version of my last moments in front of a firing-squad at Spandau, and somebody "who had a friend at the Police Presidency" had told somebody else that I was in shackles which would probably not be removed till the war was over--if then. Still another tale related circumstantially of how I had been "hurried" from Berlin at the dead of night, under military guard, to the Dutch frontier, across which, by this time, I was unceremoniously "expelled."
When I was able to gain the ear of the Ambassador--the American war-refugee panic was now at tempestuous zenith, with the Embassy like a place besieged--I represented to him that I feared my hopes of remaining in Germany, after what had happened, were slender in the extreme. Scouts had brought in the intelligence, I informed him, that a miniature mob of evident purpose was waiting in front of the Equitable Building, where The Daily Mail office was, now and then knowingly pointing to our big gilt window-sign, in order that passers-by might understand why traffic was being blocked in front of No. 59 Friedrichstrasse. If the crowd waited long enough, it probably saw at work the sign men whom I had ordered to take down the red rag. Discretion is ever the better part of valor, and I felt no compelling desire to superintend the job in person.
The Ambassador thought I was unduly disturbed. He was convinced that my arrest was purely an unfortunate blunder, due to a combination of officious patriotism and excessive zeal, and meant nothing. I was inclined to agree with him. Berlin and the Berliners had suddenly lost their minds, and nothing which occurs when a community of men are in a state of mental aberration ought in reason to be charged against them. I had obviously fallen victim to the mass dementia which robbed Germans of their senses when their lingering fears of war with England became terrifying actuality. I certainly did not overestimate the importance of the episode.
I now ran across von Wiegand of the United Press (as he then was) and Swing, of the Chicago Daily News. Being Americans, like myself, they had just taken the precaution of applying to the Foreign Office for credentials which would protect them from such delicate attentions as the police had shown me. They suggested that I should see Legationsrat Heilbron and get an Ausweiskarte. Swing was in jubilant mood. He had a scheme under promising way to accompany Major Langhorne, our military attaché, to the front as a "secretary." My heart pumped with envy. Von Wiegand had not yet worked out his forthcoming campaign for interviewing the German Empire and the Vatican, but all of us felt sure that his German noble origin, plus his nose for news and excellent official connections, would land Karl Heinrich on his feet, as far as reporting the war was concerned, if any one was going to be favored at all. The Anglo-American newspaper fraternity was already a rather decimated body. Conger, of the Associated Press, was still jailed at Gumbinnen. Wilcox, of The Daily Telegraph, had been fortunate enough, only a few days previous, to get to Russia. Ford, of The Morning Post, had not waited for the crash and left for England on one of the last peace-time trains. Tower, my night's partner in woe, had slept in the porter's basement of the American Embassy and was now a refugee in the British Embassy, where, I understood, all the other purely English correspondents were being rounded up during the day, to accompany Sir Edward Goschen and his staff out of Germany next morning on the safe-conduct train provided by the German government. Mackenzie, of The Times, with whom I had plotted by telephone, was still unarrested, for some miraculous reason; I had not yet seen the original "denunciation" of our espionage operations, from which I later knew that he had only been identified as "Kingsley." He can blame that circumstance, no doubt, for having been denied the privilege of my own experiences.
At five o'clock, the customary hour for newspaper men to visit the Foreign Office, I went to call on Legationsrat Heilbron. He had not yet come in, so I sent my card to his colleague, Legationsrat Esternaux, with whom I had enjoyed professional acquaintance ever since the hour of my arrival in Germany, thirteen years previous to the week. I assured Esternaux that I cherished no particular animosity toward the police authorities for my silly arrest, being convinced that a grotesque mistake alone was responsible. Mildly apologetic, he acquiesced in this view.