Something told me that even a twelfth-hour attempt might be made to hamper my get-away, so, as a "positively last farewell" favor I asked "Joe" Grew, my rescuer from the police, to escort me to the train. Though it meant his tumbling out of bed at the unromantic hour of five, his breezy "Sure, I will" set my mind completely at rest. He arrived at the appointed minute. The sight of the Stars and Stripes flapping at the front of his car was a reassuring little picture. They had meant much to me during the preceding forty-eight hours. At the British Embassy, which looked more like a baggage-room or express-office struck by lightning, with the floors littered indiscriminately with hastily-packed boxes of documents and records, trunks, suit-cases, golf-bags and batches of clothing hastily slung or strapped into or around traveling-rugs--and all the other indescribable impedimenta of a suddenly-retreating army or an evicted family--I found my German pass awaiting me. It had been delivered to Godfrey Thomas, one of Sir Edward Goschen's able young attachés, all of whom, like the Ambassador himself, had given so characteristic an exhibition of British imperturbability during the final hours of crisis. The pass described me as "the English newspaper correspondent, Wile." It is reproduced opposite this page. I treasure it with the same pride which probably inspires a reprieved man to cherish the document which cheats the hangman.
Facsimile of the Pass
There was no guard of honor to bid Sir Edward Goschen and his staff Godspeed from the Wilhelmstrasse. No single German was so poor as to do them reverence except a couple of sleepy policemen and half-a-dozen blear-eyed, early-rising Berliners on their way to work. None of them had yet learned to say Gott strafe England, so the lonely cavalcade of luggage-laden taxis, which were hauling Great Britain's official representatives on the first stage of their journey out of the enemy's capital, proceeded on its way without molestation or demonstration.
The very day the Kaiser's ambassador to England, Prince Lichnowsky, was accorded a departure from London amid honors customarily reserved for a ruling sovereign. Great Britain's ambassador to Germany was leaving like a thief in the night, the Imperial Government having requested him, when shaking the dust of Berlin from his miscreant feet, to slink to the railway station as inconspicuously as possible and long before the righteous metropolis waked. Otherwise, it was solicitously suggested, Kultur, giving vent to the holy venom which now filled the Teutonic soul, might feel constrained to stone the Ambassador afresh. Thus, I, too, chaperoned by Grew, sneaked out of Berlin.
My old German teacher was right. She said there was no word for "gentleman" in the Kaiser's language. The fashion in which his people went to war with England proved it.
CHAPTER XII
SAFE CONDUCT
Lehrter Bahnhof, the gateway through which so many American tourists have passed out of Berlin en route to Hamburg or Bremen steamers, was not en fête in honor of the departing Engländer. My memory traveled back irresistibly to the last time the British Embassy in force was assembled there--to greet King George and Queen Mary when they arrived to visit the German Court in May, 1913. The rafters rang on that occasion with the blare of a Prussian Guards band thundering God Save the King, cousins George and William embraced fondly and kissed, and the station was swathed in the entwined colors of Germany and England. It was a different and forbidding aspect which the old brick and steel barn of a train-shed presented this muggy August morning. At every entrance sentries in gray and policemen with Brownings at the belt stood guard, for railways and stations were now as integral a part of the war-machine as fortresses and guns. Inside, infantrymen in gray from head to foot--all Germany had now grown gray--carrying rifles with fixed bayonets patrolled the platforms, searching each Englishman, as he came along, with glances mingling watchfulness and contempt.
Our band of pilgrims, who were to be some forty or fifty in all, arrived in detachments, having, as Sir Edward Goschen himself officially described it, "been smuggled away from the Embassy in taxicabs by side streets." The Ambassador himself was one of the last to turn up. No Imperial emissary came to wish him a happy journey and Auf Wiedersehen, though the Foreign Secretary deputized young Count Wedel to say good-by in his name. The Kaiser's farewell greeting to Sir Edward was conveyed the day before, when the All-Highest sent an adjutant with majestic regrets for the sacking of the Embassy premises on the night the war broke out. Of markedly less apologetic tenor was the adjutant's message that William II, "now that Great Britain had taken sides with other nations against her old allies of Waterloo, must at once divest himself of the titles of British Field Marshal and British Admiral." The uniforms, orders and decorations conferred on him by Perfidious Albion had desecrated the exalted person of the supreme Hohenzollern for the last time. In the memorable dispatch in which he so dispassionately narrated his final hours in Berlin, Sir Edward Goschen sufficiently indicated the true character of the Kaiser's adieu by mentioning that "the message lost none of its acerbity by the manner of its delivery." As a Prussian officer was firing it at the official incarnation of Great Britain, it is not difficult to imagine the mien and tone of the proud functionary on whom had been conferred the historic distinction of breathing Hate in the face of the foe at that cataclysmic hour.