The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time - Frederic William Wile

We've watched you playing cricket

And every kind of game.

At football, golf and polo,

You men have made your name.

But now your country calls you

To play your part in war,

And no matter what befalls you,

We shall love you all the more.

So, come and join the forces

As your fathers did before.

CHORUS

Oh! We don't want to lose you,

But we think you ought to go.

For your King and your Country

Both need you so!

We shall want you, and miss you,

But with all our might and main

We shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you,

When you come back again!

These words, in prosaic type, look banal. Their appeal seems trite. Yet rendered to plaintive melody by such an operatic artist as little Maggie Teyte, they went straight to men's hearts. They must have sent thousands upon thousands of cricketers, footballers, golfers and poloists--that is a classification which takes in pretty nearly all Englishmen--into khaki and training-camps. But the growing insistence with which the walls and windows of Old England were plastered with recruiting posters--even entire front pages of newspapers were now employed to advertise that "Your King and Country Need You"--indicated that Kitchener's army was not being built up yet by the desired leaps and bounds. Obviously the war needed some other kind of advertising than even the accomplished Mr. Le Bas could give it. It was not strange that the enthusiasm of Englishmen, cheated of the chance to know what was really going on at the front, was beginning to find expression in other directions.

Greeting the Kaiser (in helmet) the day he declared Germany "in a state of war," July 31st, 1914.

It was not magnificent, for example, but it was natural, that Englishmen should, in all the circumstances, reveal a very materialistic passion to "capture Germany's trade." Denied the opportunity of "enthusing" over events at the seat of war, they proceeded to dedicate themselves energetically to the task of eliminating the Germans as a factor in the markets of the world. A profound book on the subject appeared--The War on German Trade, with the sub-titles of "Ammunition for Civilians" and "Hints for a Plan of Campaign." My old friend, Sidney Whitman, the distinguished author of Imperial Germany, dignified it with a preface. England had not entered upon the war "in a commercial spirit or with a commercial purpose," he said, "yet it behooves her to seize and hold fast the ripe fruit which has dropped into Englishmen's lap--as a first incident in the clash of nations." The volume had frankly been published, explained Whitman, "with the purpose of stimulating the English manufacturer and the English trader to seize the opportunities thrust upon them by the war."

Then, as the Censorship, as callous to criticism and abuse as if it were a sphinx, still insisted that Englishmen must fight and die in the dark, as far as their kith and kin were concerned, patriotism at home found vent in a crusade against the Germans still at large on British soil. They numbered thousands. They were a distinct and undeniable danger. In days of peace they spied patriotically and flagrantly, thanks to John Bull's easy-going, guileless toleration of the stranger within his gate. Personally I never believed that the German waiters and barbers in the Savoy or the Carlton, and their myriad of confrères elsewhere in the country, were the advance guard of the German army of invasion in disguise. Nor did I imagine (as I actually made a very British friend once seriously believe) that Appenrodt's restaurants in the Strand and Piccadilly were in reality masked commissariat-stations of the Kaiser's General Staff. Nor could even so persuasive an authority as William Le Queux, author of German Spies in England, convince me that every German resident who kept homing-pigeons, owned a country-place near the East Coast suitable for wireless, or got drunk on the Kaiser's birthday in the Gambrinus restaurant in Glasshouse Street, was a paid member of the Berlin secret-service. Most of these stories made me smile as broadly as the "star" rumor of the war--the story that seventy thousand armed Russians had been "actually seen" by Heaven knows how many veracious Britons sneaking across England from Newcastle to Southampton, on their stealthy way from Archangel to the Western allied front.

Yet it was palpably not the hour for German subjects, any number of them of military age and ardor, to be at large in England. So Britain, in a tardy manifestation of self-preservation, began to arrest and intern the Kaiser's hapless subjects, who hitherto had suffered no impairment of their liberties except detention in the country, compulsory visits to the police, and restriction of movement (except by special permission) to an area five miles from their domicile. The German is far too much of a patriot to be trusted to do as he pleases in a country with which his Fatherland is at war. He never forgets that he is a German first, and a stock-broker earning commissions in London, a barber taking English tips, or a waiter spilling English soup, afterward. It is always Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles with him. He may not have made a profession or habit of writing home to Berlin or Hamburg, Cologne or Breslau, Kiel or Wilhelmshaven, what he noted of interest at Aldershot, Portsmouth, Dover, Woolwich, or Sheerness, or what his English friends might from time to time tell him of interest at the Admiralty or the War Office. But it was "bomb-sure," as the Teuton idiom rather appropriately puts it, that if ever a British state secret fell into Herr Apfelbaum's hands on the Stock Exchange, or into Johann's in the "hair-dressing saloon" of the Ritz, or into Gustav's at the grillroom of the Piccadilly, that morsel would sooner or later find its way to Germany. When one considered that Englishmen of the highest class--one even said the King had a German valet!--were attended night and day, in their homes, their clubs, their offices and their favorite "American bars," hotels, grillrooms, cafés and restaurants by Germans, with eyes to see and ears to hear, it was small wonder that an irresistible cry was sent up before the winter of war had advanced very far, that these "enemy aliens" should not be merely ticketed, labeled and superficially watched, but placed behind barbed-wire, with British sentries on guard. And so it came to pass that Mr. McKenna, Home Secretary, whose reluctance to intern the Germans gossip absurdly ascribed to his "German connections," finally ordered "the enemy in our midst" to be rounded up. Not all of them were at first taken. Thousands remained at liberty. The British are a patient and a trusting clan.

It was not only the acknowledged German subject in Great Britain who was the object of the anti-Teuton crusade. The naturalized German, in many cases the holder for years of a certificate of British citizenship, was made to feel the blight of the wave of passion sweeping over the country. Naturalized Germans have won in England wealth and eminence outstripping even the heights to which they have climbed in the United States. In the preceding reign they were the bosom companions of the Sovereign. King Edward's intimate circle contained the Cologne financier, Sir Ernest Cassel, and another Prussian native, Sir Felix Semon, was His Majesty's Physician Extraordinary. In the "City," London's Wall Street, German financiers almost dominated the picture. Baron Schroeder (naturalized only within a few hours of the outbreak of the war) was so great a power that citizenship was practically thrust upon him as a measure of vital British self-protection. Sir Edgar Speyer, like Cassel a member of the King's Privy Council, and a Baronet besides, was not only a City magnate, but controlled London's vast system of surface and underground traction lines, including the omnibus service; yet his English counting-house was a branch of a parent establishment in Frankfort-On-Main. These were a few of the outstanding names among the "Germans" in high place in England. They by no means exhausted the list. Domiciled in this country for years, they had, while openly maintaining sentimental relations with their Fatherland, played no inconspicuous rôle in British affairs, economic and political. Any number of naturalized Germans were married to British women and were fathers of British-born families. Scores of their sons were already wearing King George's khaki in Kitchener's army. Sir Ernest Cassel had given five thousand pounds to the Prince of Wales' National Relief Fund. Yet rumor shortly afterward had him locked up in a traitor's cell in the Tower of London! No matter how acclimatized these naturalized Germans had become, no matter how long they had been British subjects--in many cases their title to that distinction was half a century old--they found themselves under a ban. They were not physically maltreated. Their windows were not broken. Men did not spit in their faces. They were permitted (like the rest of the British) to do "business as usual," except the stock-brokers, who were invited to keep off 'Change. But they were a marked class. If they ventured to visit clubs in Pall Mall or St. James Street, to which they had paid dues for years, they were confronted with notices reading:

Or, if the naturalized German, no matter whether his boy had just fallen at Ypres or not, went to his favorite golf-club of a Saturday or Sunday, he received a greeting to the same effect. The virtue of tolerance, a prized British quality, was vanishing from the face of these war-ridden isles.