Germany now proclaimed her new policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Mr. Gerard was recalled from Berlin and Count Bernstorff received his passports in Washington. Yet Allied faith in America, momentarily revived by these events, took wings once more when it became known that Mr. Wilson's next "step" would be armed neutrality. The editor of The Times, who had been exceptionally tolerant of the pestiferous Bell, imagined now, I fancy, that events had at length put a timely end to the letter-writing energies of the Chicago scribe; for Englishmen, with notably few exceptions, had by this time pretty well "eliminated" America from their calculations. But on February 22, inspired perhaps by the rugged traditions clinging to that date, Bell cleared for action for the fifth time and next day The Times printed him for the fifth time. He wrote: "I will risk the view that we are on the edge of great things in America--things worthy of the country of Washington and Lincoln. America, I feel, is about to fructify internationally--about to make her real contribution to humanity and history." The Times now went so far as to suggest, with characteristic prudence, that Bell's "sagacious and racy letter deserves careful consideration by all who are trying to understand the situation in Washington." Unhappily, there was little evidence in the continued British mistrust of America that The Times' counsel was being taken widely to heart.
On February 27 Bell craved the indulgence of The Times for his sixth, and final, epistle to the skeptics. With what was destined to turn out to be rare prescience and penetration, he now said that Mr. Wilson's delay in coming to grips with Hohenzollernism meant only that "the president wants the public temper so hot throughout America that it will instantly burn to ash any revolutionary unrest or any opposition by the pacifist diehards." Five weeks later the United States and Germany were at war, with the American nation united in fervent support of the president's pronunciamento that the task which demanded the renunciation of our neutrality was one to which "we can dedicate our lives, our fortunes, everything we are and everything we have." The hour of Europe's awakening from its scornful dreams had come.
For several days after Congress, at the president's instigation, voted to "accept the gage of battle," there lay neatly folded up in a certain front room of the American Embassy in London a fine, new American flag. It had been put there for a special purpose--to be hoisted at a psychological moment believed to be imminent. Our people in Grosvenor Gardens, in their hearty, imaginative American way, considered that there might possibly be a "demonstration" in welcome of Britain's latest comrade-in-arms. There were visions of a procession, brass bands and cheering crowds; and the spick and span stars and stripes were to be flung to the glad breeze when the "demonstrators" reached the scene and called for a speech from Ambassador Page on the Embassy balcony. Such things happened when Italy and Roumania "came in." Surely history would not fail to repeat itself in the case of "daughter America." But neither procession, bands, cheers nor crowds ever materialized. After all, we could not expect Englishmen to celebrate in honor of the greatest mistake they had ever made in their lives. That would be something more than un-English. It would be a violation of all the laws of human nature.
Yet I suppose there was not an American in Great Britain who was not keenly disappointed at the conspicuously undemonstrative character of our welcome into the Allied fold. I must not be understood as minimizing the warmth of either governmental or press utterances evoked by President Wilson's Lincolnesque speech to Congress and the action which so promptly ensued. The sentiments expressed by Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Bonar Law, Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Bryce, in and out of Parliament, and the thoughts which found vivid expression in the columns of the newspapers of London and the provinces left little to be desired; but eloquent and hearty as they were, their effect upon that all-powerful molder of British public opinion known as the Man in the Street was strangely negligible. I am sure I am not the only American in England who, waiting for words of greeting from British friends and not getting them, was irresistibly constrained to search for the reason. Our chagrin was not lessened by assurances from Paris that "France was going wild with joy"; that the president's speech was being read aloud in the schools and officially placarded on all the hoardings of the republic; that the government buildings were flying the tricolor and "Old Glory" side by side; and that American men were being publicly embraced in the boulevards.
Many Americans found themselves, for reasons never entirely clear to them, the objects of "congratulation." I know of at least one instance in which a very estimable American lady, showered with "congratulations" by British friends on the action of her country, preserved sufficient presence of mind to suggest that she thought "congratulations" were due to the Allies. Another favorite view advanced by vox populi was that America had only "come in" at this late stage of the sanguinary game because "the war was won" and intervention now was "safe" and "cheap." It was not uncommon to be told that our determination to "spend the whole force of the nation" was due to commercial acumen and our desire to safeguard the heavy "investment" we had already made in the Allied cause. Last-ditchers--their name was legion: the Englishmen who refused to believe even yet that America "meant business"--declined to throw their hats into the air and shout until "big words" had become "big deeds." Much more impressive in my own ears seemed the explanation that Britons were not tumultuous in our honor because these days of endless sacrifice--the spring offensive in France was at its height and the nation's best were falling in thousands--were not days for cheering and flag-waving. And, finally, there was that extensive school of thought which had always and sincerely opposed American intervention on the ground that America, as a neutral granary and arsenal, was a more effective Allied asset than a belligerent America which would naturally and necessarily husband its vast resources for its own military requirements.
The story of Germany's state of mind toward America's entry into the lists against her is soon told. The German government and German people looked upon us as all but declared enemies throughout the war. They felt, and repeatedly said, that we were doing them quite as much damage as neutrals as we could possibly inflict in the guise of belligerents. That, indeed, was the argument on which Hindenburg and his fellow-strategists based the "safety" of inaugurating unrestricted submarine warfare and the moral certainty of war with the United States as a result. Not all Germans blithely relegated the prospect of a formally hostile America to the realm of inconsequence. Hindenburg and Ludendorff know nothing about America. But men like Ballin, Gwinner, Rathenau and Dernburg know that the United States, in a famous German idiom, is, indeed, "the land of unlimited possibilities." There can be no manner of doubt that the vision of America's limitless resources harnessed to those of the nations already at war with their country always filled the business giants of the Fatherland with all the terror of a nightmare. But as those elements, both before and during the war, were as a voice crying in the wilderness of Prussian militarism, they were condemned to silence when the dreaded thing became a reality; and the only note that issued forth from Berlin was the "inspired" croak in the government-controlled press that only the expected had happened; that Hindenburg's plans had been made with exact regard for that which had now supervened, and that Germany's irresistible march to victory would not and could not be arrested by anything the Americans could do.
Doubts were universally expressed in America and in Allied Europe as to whether the Kaiser's government would permit President Wilson's crushing indictment of Prussianism to be published in Germany. One heard of picturesque schemes to drop millions of copies of the speech over the German trenches and towns from aeroplanes. In at least one widely-read German newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt, a Radical-Liberal journal which has not entirely surrendered its old-time independence, the president's speech was printed almost verbatim. In nearly every paper there were adequate extracts. But such effect as they may have been designed to create upon the German body politic--particularly the president's insistence that America's war is with "the Imperial German Government" and not with "the German people"--was nullified by the press bureau's imperious orders to editors to reject Mr. Wilson's "moral clap-trap" as impudent and insolent interference with Germany's domestic concerns. Under the leadership of the celebrated Berlin theologian, Professor Doctor Adolf Harnack, meetings of German scholars and savants were organized for the purpose of giving public expression to the "unanimity and indignation with which the German nation protests against the American president's officious intrusion upon matters which are the affair of the German people and themselves alone." Or words to that effect.
Meantime the so-called comic press of Germany, which to an extent probably unknown in any other country of the world gives the keynote for popular sentiment, engaged in an orgy of unbridled abuse of President Wilson, the United States and Americans in general. The leitmotif of hundreds of cartoons, caricatures and jokes was that the "American money power" had "dragged" us into the war. Simplicissimus epitomized German thoughts of the moment in a full-page drawing entitled "High Finance Crowning Wilson Autocrat of America by the Grace of Mammon." The president was depicted enthroned upon a dais resting on bulging money-bags and surmounted by a canopy fringed with gold dollars. A crown of shells and cartridges is being placed upon his head by the grinning shade of the late J. Pierpont Morgan. In the background is the filmy outline of George Washington, delivering the farewell address.
Then, of a sudden, German press policy toward the United States underwent a radical change. Silence supplanted abuse. It became so oppressive and so profound as to be eloquent. The purpose of this organized indifference soon became crystal-clear: on the one hand to bolster up German confidence in the innocuousness of American enmity, and, on the other, to slacken the United States' war preparations by committing no "overt act" of word or deed designed to stimulate them. Bernstorff had by this time reached Berlin and there is reason to suspect that his was the crafty hand directing the new policy of ostensible disinterestedness in American belligerency. The arrival of American naval forces in European waters; the inauguration of conscription; the far-reaching preparations for succoring our Allies with money, food and ships; the splendid success of the Liberty Loan; the presence of General Pershing and the headquarters staff of the United States Army in France; the enrollment of nearly ten million young men for military service; our ambitious plans for the air war; the girding up of our loins in every conceivable direction, that we may play a worthy part in the war--all these things have been either deliberately ignored in Germany, by imperious government order, or, when not altogether suppressed from public knowledge, been slurred or glossed over in a way designed to make them appear as harmless or "bluff." Finally, in an "inspired" article which offered sheer affront to the large body of truly patriotic American citizens of German extraction, the Cologne Gazette bade Germans to continue to pin their faith in "our best allies," i.e., the German-Americans, who might be relied upon (quoth the semi-official Watch on the Rhine) to "inject into American public opinion an element of restraint and circumspection which has already often been a cause of embarrassment to Herr Wilson and his English friends." "We may be sure," concluded this impudent homily, "that our compatriots are still at their post."
Events have marched fast since America "came in." In Great Britain and France men of perspicacity are not quite so jubilant over the effects of the Russian revolution as they were three months ago. They realize that the amazing cataclysm which began in Petrograd on March 13 warded off a treacherous peace between Romanoff and Hohenzollern, but also, alas! that it has effectually eliminated Russia as a fighting factor for the purposes of this year's campaign. Englishmen and Frenchmen are only now beginning to comprehend the immeasurable task that confronts New Russia in the erection of a democratic state on the ruins of autocracy while faced by the simultaneous necessity of warring against an enemy in occupation of vast Russian territory.