Not till many days after we landed in New York did I know that two very eminent representatives of Allied Powers were sandwiched among the Campania's home-fleeing American passengers--Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, British Ambassador at Washington, and his colleague of France, the cultured Monsieur Jusserand. They had crossed in impenetrable incognito. Not only were their names missing from the passenger-list, but if they had ever promenaded or eaten or smoked, they must have done it in solitary enjoyment of their own exclusive society, as nobody during seven whole days and nights ever heard of them or saw them, or, what is vastly more miraculous aboard-ship, ever even talked about them. American newspapermen afloat in a liner like to flatter themselves that nothing with even the remotest odor of news ever escapes their insatiable quest. I had myself bored with strenuous pertinacity into every news-well in the Campania, and there were many. But Spring-Rice and Jusserand eluded me as thoroughly as if they had been contraband stored away in the hold, or stokers who only come to life out of the black hole of Calcutta once or twice a trip, when everybody with a white face is tight asleep. Bernstorff came in two days later like a brass band. The British and French Ambassadors broke into the United States, apparently, in felt-slippers through a back door on a dark night. The manner of the respective arrivals of the German and the Allied Ambassadors was to be characteristic of their conduct in the country throughout the war.
On Monday, August 24, I was lunching at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Bernstorff had landed that forenoon in the Dutch liner, Noordam. To my astonishment, the Ambassador, whom I had noticed lunching a few tables away with James Speyer, arose and advanced across the restaurant to where I was sitting. Bernstorff and I were old acquaintances. I liked him. Most newspapermen did. Through long residence in Washington, he had acquired an almost Rooseveltian art in dealing with us. I used to see him regularly during his periodical official visits to Berlin, having known him professionally from the days he was Councillor of the German Embassy in London during the Boer War. Few Americans are aware that Count Bernstorff was born in England while his father was serving as Prussian Minister to the Court of St. James. History was destined to repeat itself in the case of the son, who not only adopted the career of his father, but when he became an ambassador to a neutral country during one of Germany's wars was called upon to occupy himself just as the elder Count Bernstorff had done in London in 1870-71. The father put in most of his time in England in a vain endeavor to persuade Queen Victoria's Government to place an embargo on shipment of British arms and ammunition to the French. He failed as lamentably in that effort as his son and heir was destined to do in the United States under almost identical circumstances forty-four years later.
Smiling his most persuasive diplomatic grimace, Count Bernstorff went straight to the object of his luncheon-table call on me.
"Wile," he began, "you've gone back on us! I can see your hand at work in the attitude the New York Times has taken up."
I could not imagine at what the genial Count was driving. Perhaps he had read in the preceding day's Times my long account of the beginnings of the war as I observed them in Berlin, or my introduction to The Times' exclusive publication of the German White Paper, printed that day.
"Your Excellency flatters me," I ventured to rejoin. "I have only been in the country since Saturday night, and my activities at The Times office have been limited to the very prosaic duty of handing in several wads of 'copy' written aboard-ship."
But Bernstorff knew better. I had poisoned the atmosphere of Times Square against Germany's holy cause. He insisted upon thrusting upon me some occult influence over Mr. Ochs, The Times' able proprietor, and Mr. Miller, its brilliant editor, and said he was going to see somebody or other at The Times later in the day and "fix things up." Judging by the rivers of interviews which thenceforth flowed in an unceasing torrent from the Ambassador's headquarters in the Ritz-Carlton, he must have seen not only some Times men, but nearly all the journalists in Greater New York. How satisfactorily he "fixed things up" with the great newspaper which has proved to be the Allies' most consistent and effective supporter in the United States could be judged from next morning's edition, which was about as anti-Bernstorffian as could be imagined. The Imperial German Press-Agent's palaver about his ability to "fix things up" was bombast, pure and unalloyed. There was never the slightest possibility that he could "fix" anything in the New York Times office or in any American newspaper office where self-respect, journalistic honor and rugged independence are enthroned. There are American newspapers which lay no claim to these virtues, and their names are undoubtedly, and long have been, carefully card-indexed at 1435 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C. Some of their owners have decorations bestowed by the Kaiser.
It proved to be a rare stroke of Fate which took me to the Ritz-Carlton, for I was destined to be an eyewitness of the assemblage of the Kaiser's Great General Staff for the Germanization of American public opinion on the war. Doctor Dernburg had arrived in the Noordam with Count Bernstorff, and along with them came Captain Boy-Ed, the Naval Attaché at Washington. I knew personally, from Berlin days, both the ex-Colonial Secretary and the sailor. Dernburg, before he was pitchforked into Government office from the comparatively humble station of a bank director in 1906, was the most approachable of men. His command of the American language was remarkable--an inheritance from his youth, part of which was spent as a volunteer clerk in a Wall Street bank. I never forgot my first call on him in Germany. I assumed him to be a Jew, as his father was. Some Semitic question of public interest was the news of the moment, and I regarded Dernburg an ideal man to interview. With a smile I recall how, insistently disavowing his origin, he told me I had come to "the wrong address." Later I watched his tempestuous career as administrator of the barren sand-wastes known as German colonies, saw him give electioneering in the Fatherland a new phase with his shirt-sleeves campaigning methods, and observed his meteoric rise to Imperial grace and political power, so soon to be followed by his equally precipitate fall from those dizzy heights. Dernburg's lack of manners and tact was commonly said in Berlin to have led to his official demise after less than four years of Cabinet glory. No one ever questioned his eminent ability. But his reputation as a banker rested on cold-blooded ruthlessness, and when he attempted to carry those methods into a bureaucratic government department, he struck snags which wrecked his bark. Neither he nor I supposed on August 24, 1914, when we chatted in the palm-court of the Ritz-Carlton, that his attempt to transplant Berlin ruthlessness into the United States would eventually prove his undoing there, too.
Captain Boy-Ed, as subsequent history was also to show, was bent on practising in America the tactics which won him renown and promotion in Germany. Prior to coming to Washington as Count Bernstorff's Naval Attaché--the Kaiser had decided that the United States navy was attaining dimensions which required watching by a shrewd observer--the captain was von Tirpitz' right-hand man at the Imperial Admiralty in Berlin. He had charge of the so-called News Division, nominally entrusted with the duty of informing the German public of "routine naval intelligence, such as accidents, transfers of ships and officers, etc., etc.," as I once heard von Tirpitz persuasively and naïvely describe the functions of the Nachrichten-Abteilung during a periodical plea to the Reichstag for more dreadnoughts. Boy-Ed, the son of a Turkish father and a German mother, devoted himself chiefly in the years between 1906 and 1912 to conducting von Tirpitz' astute propaganda for naval expansion. It was the era in which the Kaiser's fleet was being converted by leaps and bounds from a navy of obsolete thirteen-thousand-ton ships of the Deutschland and Braunschweig class into an armada of dreadnoughts and battle cruisers of the eighteen-thousand to twenty-four-thousand-ton "all-big-gun" Ost-Friesland and Seydlitz class. German public opinion required to be carefully manipulated in order to secure parliamentary sanction for "supplementary" appropriations which rose by stealthy degrees from $60,000,000 to $115,000,000 a year. Boy-Ed was assigned the responsible duty of organizing and carrying out the necessary campaign of education, and right well and thoroughly he did it. The shoals of pamphlets, books, newspaper-articles, public-lectures, Navy League speeches and other "educational" matter with which the Fatherland was flooded--always with "England, the Foe" as the leitmotif,--were to a large extent the child of Boy-Ed's resourceful brain. He did not write them all, of course, but he was their inspirer-in-chief. I account him one of the real creators of the modern German navy, second only to von Tirpitz himself. It was "the chief's" idea, but Boy-Ed made its materialization a practical possibility.
Knowing his methods, no revelations of his pernicious activities in the United States ever surprised me. He was only up to his old tricks, altering them to suit the American climate and character, but adhering always to certain basic principles which had stood him in such good stead in the Fatherland. It would be ungrateful of me not to acknowledge numerous professional courtesies received at Boy-Ed's hands when he was misleading the press of Germany and the world at the News-Division in Leipziger-Platz, Berlin. He nearly had me arrested at the Imperial dockyard in Wilhelmshaven in March, 1907, for gaining access, despite thoroughgoing preventive measures, to the launch of Germany's first dreadnought, the Nassau, but during his career at the Admiralty he more than made up for that by enabling me, in the columns of The Daily Mail, to be the medium of a formal discussion between von Tirpitz and the British naval authorities on the endlessly controversial question of Anglo-German sea rivalry. For the best "copy" it was ever my good fortune to send across the North Sea, my unwithering gratitude is due and is hereby expressed to the shifty chieftain of Germany's war-time "intelligence service" in the United States.